L.R. Harvey Poetry

PROWL Some of us would do far more  than crawl on all fours for the chance at seven, uninterrupted seasons  of hoofing it in the wild, bent low  enough to straighten some things out without that incessant shout to quit acting a fool and come inside for dinner. Consider yourself a winner,  O King, sampling autumn grass while all the bullshit blows past like an evening wind ruffling your hide,  old givens dying like dandelions on the flat spot where you lie closer to the pulse of things.  On behalf of us yet in exile,  condemned to live with something half-  starved inside and pawing  at the locked door of our sternums, no more cautionary tales, please. Rip reason at the seams. Let out a roar.

A QUICK WORD BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE While we can still—if with a little wit— identify the robots as something less than flesh, and while we needn’t  worry that we misaddress this word  to some blood-thick passerby  just as bent out of wack by all this as the rest of us, some of us would like to make very clear where we stand on the matter. Enough introductory blather: To the untraceable, shape-shifting spirit  hard at work animating   the smiling troop of assassins  who slip into our nurseries to mark the victims with a digital  kiss before slitting their wrists; before you finish convincing the confused, if well-meaning good guys that you're the good guys and that leaving the doors unlocked is a good way to demonstrate their unwavering faith that nothing out there can hurt us, and that conveniently it can't hurt us that you also negate the uncomfortable work of rousing oneself from slumber to get up and lock the doors; before the mask at last is knit ...

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,) 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, night 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 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 morning's sweet relief, a waking joyful in proportion to our faithful thrashing in these sweaty, 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, three again—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.

ROOTLAND 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, which is what our elders in the old country said too. What bits we do i s through the children, who we both hope learn the ropes for life here and fear they’ll forget  where they're from, though when they press the question, we're dumb. It may be neither here nor there,  but where does one locate the ache  of late September, the place abandoned train-tracks whisper towards? They're tangled, sure, these last ties to an answer, but as the chronic stab of this passed-down heart condition will gladly attest, not grown over yet.

ENCOUNTER Even without the unblinking stare in your rearview since you can recall, what with all the what's-one-mores and corner stores, keeping it between the lines is hard enough. But now he taps 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...

A BRIEF WORD 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 chapter 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 the labor like more worlds than yours depends on it. But depend on it: one day, when you fill the tires and it drives off with a will of its own , returning  to tell you in its own words what it’s seen  past the thin margins of this small town— maybe, even, past the dust- jacket of soil and sky—y ou’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 —  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 spooked and left him  when I crept closer to see. Last week they pulled a toddler from the creek downtown,  facedown. Odd that the deer's weight in my hands was heavier to me, his stiff body more real as we shoveled him under the oak tree. After the burial we biked the battle- field,  rubber tread crunching brittle dead of November. As the news makes clear, far more than deer  explode like old apples on the barrel of a baseball bat somewhere overseas.  Who knows what to make of that, since this evening, in that very same world, woodsmoke smells like what we had hoped to say and our daughters pray for   their hair done in pink rubber-bands.  Is there a thread? We look for words till suddenly we’re said, too tangl...