L.R. Harvey Poetry

HANDBOOK At what point exactly  does a drought become— with the very bloom  it withers—perennial?  The shovel leans against  the white shed, rusting  in the thought of rain.  Off Happy Valley Road a pasture is deemed ripe for harvest and a flock  of yellow Cats led out to graze,  to raze. When in this development does it become wisdom  to sell your inheritance?  There is so little  about what to do  with the handful of left-over  seeds beside the dusty trowel   at the bucket's bottom, and what there is might best be thrown out.

TILING The difference is in how you mix  the thin-set, which you want  anything but thin if you hope  your ceramics to set true, and yes, it’ll be a mess if you do. Nothing new:  in this perpetual do-it-yourself,  you’ve always had to choose  between leaving here covered  in the stuff or try to play it clean and trust your balance as the very ground begins to shift and crack beneath your feet.

  Eventually, given the firmament’s  odd proclivity for drifting further   and further apart, having a foot  firm in each world is sure to start  stretching taut the tender stuff, till soon enough you must either  pick one to ditch—though  which   is the question that got you here in the first place, spanning  the space— or learn to sit  more or less comfortably in a split,  neither here nor there but loosening your tendon-tight  conviction that it’s imperative to pick.

APPROXIMATE If you must insist to hammer the young with the imperative to pry up  like from their fumbling attempt  at a vernacular, fine, just keep in mind that you might inadvertently suggest—words are notorious for this— that our terms are for striking sure and true, cold steel with which we nail down the world once and for all, which is  totally, like, a lie, and has instilled     a long history of architects  with the confidence to set out and build more than a few brittle structures even now dusting down on our very heads.