L.R. Harvey Poetry

  THIS, TOO Before I purchased—on a whim— the windchimes, I swear the front porches  were bare, my drive past the neighor- hood hushed in the solemn seriousness of itself, and then suddenly there  they were, where they’d always been, on every third house, their notes slow- dripping in each hollow of air. To think I’ve had chime-shaped cataracts  these many years. To think of the sheer  volume of other shadowed singularities   latticing the light of our days, waiting  for a wind, a word, to lift them like a scalpel  into a tone—once heard—you can’t unhear. 

GARDEN BOXES I have done my best to keep meticulous  accounts, have accounted for  the seasonal swing of cedar  and rendered unto the various Caesars their apportioned swaths of soil, toiled to keep up  with receipts and tabs on each  transaction. And for all this  three boards lean against the trailer like indivisible numbers, unspoken for. Who of us can say for certain,  when it’s our turn to opem the books, exactly  what this lumbering faithfulness has cost us, or in the green  just how many chances of a garden  we have helped a stranger load?

ALMOST It is on the other end of all there is  to say that the all there is feels safe   enough in the silence to peek out  from the brush pile and look around.  It has eaten the peanut butter sandwiches  from all our traps and stepped nimbly  over the trigger plates. Regardless  how we fortified the coop it has made away with our attempts at domestication,  left feathers like breadcrumbs for us  to follow. For all we know it has tunneled beneath the house’s foundation  itself, making porous the packed clay of our permanence. It seems,  increasingly, that we will have to be content to coexist in glimpses, each almost another nibble at the soft part of us that’s eager to tumble into that burrow of endless entrance.

PILING UP The kicker is that to belong somewhere you have to resist the urge to kick up  and belong somewhere else. What makes this  difficult is the legion of very good reasons to do just this. Idiots sit the city council;  your neighbor burns her trash  and the charred labels of the store brand drift into your garden; light pollution,  not to mention you’re getting screwed by the electric company, the sewer company, the sheer company of those employed in the business of just such  screwing, who are not employed—as far  as you’re aware from the middling perch  of your front porch—over there. The bike  leans in the carport, the kickstand greased  as the dishes which stack like possibilities in the sinkbowl—were it to happen—of their cleaning.

FRONT LINES For weeks now the old men rise  to the summons of Cat machinery  and shuffle down their long driveways  to linger by the mailbox, discussing progress and then everything else as the county  digs up the road to lay a sewer line. Somewhere far from here, rat studies have shown  that if you isolate a sample from the control for long enough they will develop,  out of sheer, sinewy resilience, a dialect  all their own, refusing to be disposed.  At the mailbox the old mens’ stories  click into place like the faded clichés  on the church signs. If the world will be saved it will not be in a lab or at the asphalt end of a main road but in the slow, gravel stories of the left behind, unwound  right under the long nose of the developers in a language they forced on us and could never understand. 

RAISED BEDS It takes seven planks of cedar,  forty-two star-bit screws,  impact driver and miter saw, a few  eight foot 2x4’s and a table saw  if you hope to rip trim: all this  to elevate the earth three feet closer to heaven. I shudder to think— were the lumber not provided  for—just what it would cost  to get us all the way there, and even then the sheer volume of good soil needed to fill the hollow were it just these hands to scoop it, just this poor plant from which to source the seed.

  For all its buzzing bravado, throbbing harbor of a thousand stings slow-swinging  from the magnolia like a swollen epiglottis, removal  is violent but quick enough: click  of barrel rested on the windowsill,  surge of the will and just one round  of buckshot till the black cloud is released like a let wound. The more imminent threat platoons with the first warm days of February  and daffodils, its heavy thrum matching the low frequency of earth-thaw, possibility  of garden. It’s they, in a scattershot  of little sawdust piles disappearing  with the breeze, who infiltrate the lines,     introducing the house to its knees as the occupant dozes, double-barrel across his lap.

DESERTER Roughly five branches up the tree, the height he might have perched above marsh-suck and occasional click of fiddler crab to clamp eyes on the black plume of the North  as it burned down from Atlanta, someone  who bore some portion of my double-barreled helix waited till morning to throw off the grey of his conviction and silently return  to the rubble of the family farm. He has since slipped his post again, surrendering a surname f irm-set as the skeleton of Old Sheldon Church,   too deep to uproot or wholly cave in  but wondering—as maybe we’re all left to wonder, gathering the gleanings  of ourselves—just what to make  of the particular tilt o f these beams we've stumbled upon, were built around.

INTENTIONS The neighbor wants to plant a garden  with me in the sunny strip of field between our houses. I know he is hoping to grow an excuse to rent a tractor and spend an afternoon with a tiller, which  I would rather not do because I believe there are softer ways to foster growth than seeing what the grower’s guts  look like dried out in the sun,  but I won’t say this to him because  there are deeper things than topsoil,  like Eddie, my neighbor who wants our roots to tangle beneath the property line.  It is the same conundrum as the empty can of coffee grounds he keeps between his feet on his zero-turn, driving down  to sprinkle whatever chemical they contain on any anthill he sees, regardless of whose property it’s on or how near my plants. He is worried about the girls,  I know, probably thinking of his own  grown children with ants running up  their legs. I am worried about them too,  which is why I don’t like chemical...

FENCING He strung a line from the corners of his belief, staked each post deep  enough, then checked it with a level  before dropping to his knees to pull back the loose dirt and tuck it with a rubber mallet.  The red bucket of Quikrete  looked on, dusting in the shed.  “I’ve found it the best way of being  here” he said, “making clear what’s out  from what’s in, but it’s light men  who need cement to hold them  down, to blame their boundaries on.” He stood by his post until a firm shake convinced him  it would both withstand the elements  and unearth intact—whole and without an axe—come  the requisite reconfiguration. 

INTERRUPTION Thunder, quartz-flicker,  and the asphalt loosens  into mist which itself lifts a bit  less thickly than it tends to sit for a peak of how absurd  it all is—Lookout Mountain,   sky-water, legs, people in coats—till just as quickly sense clicks back into place  as that little, neurotic tenant  who’s lived on the upper floor ever since I moved into the vacancy downstairs begins to rearrange the furniture again, bending to his obsessive labor.

IN NOT UNPLEASANT PLACES Dare we say blesséd is the fenced  dog who never knows an open gate, the freight train rusting on the unswitched track, groaning forward now, n ow back?  How late are we really running  if the clocks have never been wound? Is lost lost if we've misplaced found? Sure, the house still burns down  if we call smoke sleep-eye and pretend it was a dream, but on the flip side of the pillow if we were awake enough to see  coolly through the steam to what's really licking at our door, who could even make the bed,  rouse themselves to uncradle a single word having sipped the frothy draught of what ought to be said?