L.R. Harvey Poetry

AT-HAND Nothing new, just a flare-up of the old  chronic condition, chief symptom of which is wishing for the neighbor’s fence  and all that it encloses. One supposes that given a large enough yard and a floor-plan with plenty of space for the children to go, or rather  no yard at all to mow and only the square  foot you're standing on to heat and cool, (maybe a pool, the neighbor’s spouse to share it with you,) contentment—that last, firm grape—will quit slipping the fork  to explore the wide porcelain plate of possibility, at last coming to meet  the mouth with a deciding crunch .  One supposes all kinds of things that aren’t true, reaching across the table for another grape instead of the waiting spoon.

TURNING, TOSSING If ecstasy, never yet of the taken up  variety. Visions limited to lightning bugs, September sky, a heavenly host of other sights available to most. Tongues,  sure, but strictly of colloquial kind. There was one time I prophesied, but I must confess it more of a guess.  The Apostle put it best: to some this, some that, flecks of divine  razzle-dazzle sprinkling down like heaven's dandruff to settle on unsuspecting sleeves. And then to some of us none of these, with—oh jeez— a keen awareness of the dearth: can't quite find heaven, can't quite love earth. If it's a gift, this stubborn stupor in which we slog, we'll know it only when the fog lifts from the surface of more t han the cow pond and we rise to sip of waking's sweet relief, a coming- to all the sweeter given a while longer yet of faithful thrashing in these tangled sheets.

BUILDING THE TRAMPOLINE may require a retired neighbor  to hold one side while you fit together the other. It may mean, in the last light stretched tight across September sky,  time itself unwinds and refills  the neighbor’s knees with cartilage.  There’s no safety net to protect from tumbling   headlong into joy. No one yet  has pocketed the round laugh of the moon,  but there are ways of getting closer.  And when your daughter, or maybe the neighbor’s daughter—remember,  time is kicking it's feet, suspended— comes out in her PJ’s to try it for the first time,  unable to stand straight from laughter,  you may feel something inside you spring with a sudden up- take of breath, more than your stomach lifting on the wind of an unhinged hope  that there may yet come a day  we’re double-bounced so high we never have to fall back down.

NEITHER HERE NOR THERE There's always a famine in the old  country. That’s why it’s the old country.  And we never quite acquire the cadence of the new. What bits we do is through  our children, who we hope are prepared for life here but fear they’ll forget  where they're from, though when they press the question, we’re dumb. Come to think of it, we can't quite say ourselves. W here does one locate the ache  of late September, the place abandoned train-tracks whisper towards? It's tangled, sure but they're not grown over yet, these ties past the old country to the older, root- land we hope to god to make for one long-awaited afternoon.

SEPTEMBER COLLAGE A single ladybug dies  wedged in wicker,  is spray-painted green.  Disassemble yourself.  Free trampoline.   I fear I have jumped  to conclusions. If even  pipe-smoke throws  a shadow in moon- light,  all of this means  something, right?  In the dream I find  the answer on a crumpled  piece of paper. It's written in thick-tip Sharpie.  But here, in the dim half- light of our waking, it all bleed together.

ENCOUNTER Even without the unblinking stare of high-beams igniting your rearview,  keeping it between the lines is hard enough, which would explain the officer who’s been tailing you since you can recall now tapping on your window. All  stills. You cut the transmission. He calmly demands total submission  on the shoulder, extracting you  from the driver’s seat on the firm grip of a question. There’s no question of rescue. It’s just him and you now,  face to face. He blinds you with his light and calls you by name across the narrow and straight. You feel like you’re walking on water. You spill everything. Making it home will take another miracle, even a final confiscation of the keys. No, sir, you're not fine. Follow me.

WHAT’S GOOD? Another sophomore says he’s looking forward to the weekend. I tell him one time I was looking forward and was stung on the nose by a hornet. Sometimes I dream of swatting students on the nose when they say dumb shit.   It’s a Monday in September, and I want  to scream, Look around a bit, y’all! Don’t you want to slip off your shoes and stay awhile? But who knows what Hell he knows, what promises from the false god  of Friday he’s sunk his teeth into, hoping to sound an abyss whose ground  he’ll never find. More likely, though,  just another knucklehead speaking his mind.  You can get a mean crick in the neck   from all this craning I start to say,  then stop. Hell, who doesn't want to slip out before the bell? And sure, I want them to learn to be  present, but at the end of the day   it’s nothing more than a sophomoric discontent for a home further away than Friday that offers us  even a squatter's chance of being here with any kind of purpose.

A FEW INTRODUCTORY REMARKS It’s not, of course—as we tend to spin the word—fun. I suppose there might be one out there who prefers the birthing  to the birth, but I haven’t found them  this corner of earth. Here is the thing  inside, wild and kicking and wanting  out, and here—yes, here —is the birth canal  of a ball-point. Get the point? Hope  is our only anesthetic. Grin and bear it. Heads down  now, bending to your labor like more worlds than yours depends on it.  But depend on it: one day, when it walks off  on legs of its own, returning  to tell you in its own words what it’s seen  past the margins of this small town— maybe, even, beyond soil and sky—                                you’ll know why.

AROUND HERE We live in the mist between  the cow pond and the mountain.  Wherever you are, you do too.  A two-lane and a train- track funnels us through.  At its worst, you can just make out  the yellow line’s next curve.  At its best—I like to imagine— you could see all the way  clear to where we’re going.   

CHICKAMAUGA —  a small town in North Georgia, or                Cherokee for ‘dwelling-place by the big water’ Gracie found the fawn dewed-over  in the field, who in the summer had tried his wet nose to June’s first, small windfall  beneath the apple tree. His mother left him  when I crept closer to see. Last week  they pulled a toddler from the creek downtown,  facedown. Try as I might, the fawn's  weight in my hands was heavier to me.  After the burial we biked the battle- field,  rubber tread crunching brittle dead of September. As the news makes clear, far more than deer  explode like old apples on the barrel of a baseball bat somewhere overseas.  I don’t know what to make of that, since this evening, in that very same world, woodsmoke smells like what we hoped to say and our daughters pray for   their hair done in pink rubber-bands.  Is there a thread? We look for words, then suddenly we’re said, too tangled in it  to pick out the strands. Sometimes, when it starts to fe

UNMASKED Alright I'll drop the bit. I'm far more simple than I would like  to admit. I eat sweet cereal at night.  In the morning I try on more than one  life before I step into my own.  When I get there I want to go  home. I used to shuffle my feet till I caught  a callus on the clumsy seams  with which they’ve stitched the place. After that it was a race to grow out my fingernails for a better grip   on the flap of skin beneath the chin or somewhere at back of my neck.  (The hard part would be clearing  the nose. After that, it would snap off  the scalp like a swimmer’s cap.) Heck, even pulling off my face is a simple hope. Face it: we all just want the chance— preferably before we die— to look something real in the eye.