L.R. Harvey Poetry

  WALKER COUNTY COUNCIL MEETING — first Thursday of every month The quorum hobbles through the hobbled door of the civic center, as if being touched by God in the hip socket were requisite for living  here. Mr. Chairman bestows the blessing followed by the minutes, then opens the floor for public comment. The proposed rock quarry in Rock Spring is of chief concern, the chief financial officer proffering the neighborly promise to open the floor just above the water line,  which is just more lies—per Vince McGill  off Five Points Spur, down by the Helicopter Park— to obtain the land and begin drilling well below that, contaminating the ground- water. Up bubbles a low murmur, then a spill over  of comments regarding the recent infestation  of litterbugs in Lafayette, the merit of another bite on tax dollars for the county’s new Dodge Ram,  a shout out for such a damn successful Desert Storm  memorial at the library. No decisions are made,  and...

THAT’S NOT GOING ANYWHERE Time was I trailed safely behind the assumption that they wouldn’t let someone haul such an assemblage of bric-a-brac unless they knew for a fact they knew  what they were doing. In the ensuing  years I have since come into   a load of my own, a thick tangle of ratchet straps and a secondhand   fifth wheel, then watched as the rusty  narrative began to swerve, and with a jolt at last swing loose. Like everyone else  who hauls around the odd angles  of their life, breath partially held  and eyes bouncing back and forth  from road to rearview, the hope has changed lanes, merging into the slower desire to just get where we’re going with something to show for it  and nobody seriously hurt on the way.

MANURE Like so many others she profits off horseshit. Like so very few  she drives the tractor herself,  maneuvers the bucket to lay it  deftly down on the trailer the way she did the body  of the old mare, and the older.  She takes the folded bills I give her and straightens them out till they stand up in her hand  like sprouts unfurling to light  or sleepers inflamed to attention,  keeping the book in her head  as if to make sure the sum total of our shared labor will come out  to nothing less than a garden.

  WIND ADVISORY The chickens carried on with what they knew to do,  huddled in the harbor of the henhouse as the whole sky became a hawk circling. Wood chips took flight from the mulch pile to pepper  the house’s siding, loose shingles  lifting like tail feathers while a feed bag scraped across  the field with the neighbor, out  to bolt lock the shed door. This is  no more, no less, than any other  storm we prepare to repair from,  identical, even, but for the brass  set of wind chimes bought on a whim  and hanging from the garden arch.  We are offered little reason to believe  the deluge will abate or change course,  but littler reason still not to hope that even the fury of its approach might yet be harnessed and set ringing. 

THE SKIN-CHANGER COMES HOME Having soured of the serial  sift, hollow hope of hanger-click  and the ill-fit of all  that refuses to accommodate  the peculiar bulges of these,  our increasingly peculiar  figures, let us find ourselves instead returning to the enigmas crumpled in the corner, the frayed  ones which insist to slip all categories of the closet but fit us so well  we can give ourselves some slack if we repeatedly fell for the silken whispers saying we had nothing on.