L.R. Harvey Poetry

MOVING  If we did, of course, we would take  you with us, at least this you  and this me, if you catch what I mean.  We’d have to leave here, you  understand, someone waiting in the bathtub for a towel, another with a paint trowel still wet in their hands and big plans to tackle the basement come spring, full of the many people who did and said things in this shelter for saying and doing.  We got the biggest van they have  for moving, but from what I gather  there’s no box big enough for all  the selves who lived here once, those old ones who have put their foot down and absolutely refuse to leave.   

TRUE STORY Not that it’s factual, edges whittled  down to fit through the brittle mold  of the cold credible. Neither does being there quite merit the mark, our proclivity  for center stage prone to warp  the world into audience, though surely  acting in it does play a part. What then?  Goodness? Is it how it helps peel back the bark  to reveal the hidden grain  of that twisted tree which is, in fact,  fact ? Is it that for the flower’s  brief moment we don’t have to act?  And who’s to say it won’t, one day,  get up and slap us on the back the way we imagine true things are supposed to do, laughing  like two old friends reunited after all these years: L ook at me? Look at you!

PARDON THE INTERRUPTION Just as something real begins  to sink beneath the aluminum desktops, even the torn pages of t he graffitied textbook colored with a story worth believing, the bell will ring  or someone will need to use the restroom  or there’s the fire drill you forgot about or  maybe a real fire, and up in steam  will go any embers of lasting  change, which would be strange  if this weren’t the way it’s always been,  the hallways we shuffle between forever shadowed by the principal -ities whose work behind the scenes is to ensure that—by whatever means  necessary—things keep running.   

WHAT WE FOUND We lost cell service first, then  the reassurance in my voice that I knew  where we were going or how to get back.  For a while we white-knuckled our belief  that even mountain roads pop you out  somewhere eventually, till slowly asphalt gave way to gravel and nothing about the few houses tucked back in the trees  suggested open doors. I was sure, even then, that I could back out of this  dead-end with a bit of pluck and a twelve-point  turn, and then the wheels began to spin and somewhere in Blue Ridge you started to cry. We thought that  we were going to die there, or maybe fall  in love, and it was dark enough— is sometimes still dark enough— for the two to blur like the red-blue of tow-lights through morning fog.  

ROADSIDE On just which stretch of interstate  is largely extraneous to the matter  at-hand, which is just where the mitten fell from, or how the pair of cargo  shorts found their way into the limb  of the roadside pine. Coolers,  we know, are prone to pop like fleas  from truck beds, the occasional mattress to be expected in the median,  but what’s to be said of the perfectly fine pair of shoes, the blue, stuffed elephant,  the floral-print pants beside a game of  Risk, which is what it would be  to stop and ask questions at this hour,  this speed? We might be smithereened  if we do, but whatever cracked door  we’re racing toward and hoping somehow to squeeze through evidently  may require just such an inexplicable  shedding onto the shoulder  of the cab’s contents, our double-buckled need to know. 

MAPPING THE LANDSCAPE Laid out alone, the transparency  of the region's elevations is approachable enough, each range and summit distinct and more than surmountable against the familiar grain of tabletop. The rivers, too,  can be traced and named, the food groups of the native peoples’ distinguished   with the ease of suggested slots on the cafeteria’s  paper plates. During the test, though,  when all of it is layered together, piled on top of the late-afternoon hunger of our lives,  the only answer many of us can provide in the allotted time is that there’s a famine somewhere in the region whose borders we suddenly cannot seem to trace.

FURTHER PREPARATION After Christmas the curtain parts and we peer toward the plot on the other side  of the driveway. The ground will soon  give way for work. The fence will need to be repaired and the greenhouse built  from a collection of old windows. Cardboard sags into soil and the trailer sits idle, thirsting for wood chips. In a few months we will need to reckon once again with our distaste for pulling weeds and eating vegetables,  but as yet we’re far from fruit . Today  let us take the shovel and the hammer and establish ourselves   t he perimeters of a chance for a fruitful reckoning. 

LONG WEEKEND The long nights questioning  if something is alive up there have been laid to rest, the sporadic pattering above us answer enough.  And if it doesn’t take an architect to know that the air and water flow somewhere below the middle floors,  the pull-down attic door was sealed  before our residence, and the hatch  to the crawlspace offers room  for no more than a peak into its dark entanglements. Before we can see what we’re dealing with there is  the problem of access to address, a puzzle which in itself requires  we strap on a headlamp  and pry open the part of us  that stays the hammer in our hands. 

BLOOD ON THE SHEETS Of course there’s something beneath our waking that sucks our blood when we’re asleep enough to believe  it. Of course it thrives in the slats of the floorboards, the secondhand  furniture, between the covers  of an old book and the nook behind  the power outlets. We always knew  this itching had to be generated from somewhere,  that even were we to put our fingers on it it would come crawling back  from a crack we hadn’t yet explored.  We’re losing our minds. Nothing is ours anymore. After all this time, our various precautions, to think that we’re finally getting it.

END OF MY ROPE Evidently we’ve miscalculated the coordinates: the end  of ourselves is miles further  than we imagined on setting out. Don’t leave it out: We won’t be back  in time for dinner. And to consider  that tangle once passed for a garden is to admit we didn’t yet unearth  the mother-weed. Wash the linens  and scrub the baseboards  till our knees bleed, in the morning  the newest offspring goes  skittering across the sheets.  There may have been a death,   and it may have been real  enough, but the dead are now  waking us from sleep as they knock  at the door and invite us to come  with them into the dark dawning of a world with always more dying to do.

GATLINBURG And then after woofing a sackful  of fudge we’ll share two scoops  of Krazy Kaeden’s pork rinds,  Extra Krispy, as we pick through  Route 66 signs and mass-produced authentic Indian leatherwork  before settling on an initialed knife  or a cast-iron skillet on our way out  the door to the indoor waterpark,  looking out the window for bears prowling through the tree-line  of signs for antique stores. What’s that?  You think you’re too good for this?  You think the crowded strip of yourself makes some kind  of all-natural, cohesive sense?

FIFTH-WHEEL I used to follow comfortably behind pick-up trucks and trailers loaded down with a frayed couch or maybe a handful  of water heaters. They wouldn’t let  someone transport such a haul, I used  to think, unless they were sure they knew what they were doing. In the ensuing  years I have since acquired a load  of my own and an old trailer, a tangle  of ratchet straps. I click them down  and give it a shake with a half- hearted “that’s not going anywhere,”  like everyone else who hauls around  the odd angles of their life behind them, breath partially held and eyes bouncing back and forth from road to rearview.

COMMUTE Quit kidding yourself: this late  in the game no one gets a full view  of things, windshield fully defrosted.  If we’re going to make it it’ll be hunched over the wheel and hawking  the dotted line through a pinhole,  changing lanes in faith  that if we can survive a mile  or two further down the road  things may yet open up a bit.