L.R. Harvey Poetry

THE TREE We didn’t plant it, but ours was the roof it loomed over, so aggressively green and always branching in directions we didn't plan. We had thought ourselves fit to take up the sheers and shape it  to the space, but how quickly it got out  of hand, knuckling up against the house  and vining fingers over the fence to involve the neighbors. Even after we cut it down it wouldn’t  let us rest, its thick stretch of torso rerouting the road till we took a chain saw  to its trunk, an axe to the rounds, then burned till nothing was left untouched by the ash. Even now, in skins we washed till they shrunk too tight for us, the occasional whiff of its smoke sets our own roots aching.

BLOCKHEADS The fear—as close as I can make it  out—is that the sculptor, having freed the face, will then proceed  to fall in love with the chisel  and the knife, the secret method for mastering cheekbones, peculiar twist  of the wrist sure to render  the ripples of the hair  just so. The fear, as so, is fair  enough, if also a likely culprit  for the increasing mass kicking back  their chairs not to find better instruction but to crowd the studio  exit, taking to the streets in search of a pair of eyes that will return the gaze.

The Neighbor’s Parkinson’s Not the blessing you imagined, this inability to pinch a pen or fit a Philip's-head to the bit, but when everything we vise into our grip becomes, in time, a tool, some of us could use a dropped screw or two, quaking in the gold-plated glint of all we cannot seem to hold.

  Monday, After Easter We unpacked the truck from Spring Break  then loaded right back up to celebrate Easter Sunday and its brazen hope, heavy  as the brooder box of chicks I unearthed from the basement and carried outside  after church to give them a first taste  of a light bright enough to shatter  their little heat lamp, their cooped-up  minds. That night I brought them back  inside, woke Monday before sunrise  to find one of them dead, crowned  with another’s warm shit on the cold angle  of its feathered head. I buried her  beneath the oak tree, then scraped together a lesson plan for a room  of students who—having just sampled Summer—slouch beneath the weight of just how far we are from that  sun-kissed self. Is this, then, the real gift  of these brief reprieves, not to lighten the load  but more keenly know the heaviness  of all we lack? Anyway, welcome back.   

Happiness Even before we knew the element was lighter than air, we were plenty aware  that something was not tied tight enough around our wrists. Is a brief dizziness,  a laughable lift in pitch, really the ultimate  party trick before we drift once again into the deflated night? What we’re here for is certainly more solid, (right?), heavy even  as the stone which the graffiti’d textbook  avers will not fall faster from the tower  than any penny-sized pebble, but for all the slowness of its descent would make us stop and look up, and this time not to watch something fly away. 

Walker County Commisioners Meeting: April 3rd Ned Yates is incensed that from here on out it must be written down.  He knuckles the podium with a frown  and sputters out “You all oughta know  by now that here in this county  we’re not a buncha pencil-pushin geeks,”  by which he means that just to speak is barrier enough to get at what we’re  after. Muffled laughter, and Mr. Yates mumbles  what sounds like “scalawags,” to which  commissioner Askew (despite his digs) doesn’t camouflage his objection  as he scrapes back his chair  to wag a finger and shout  “If you’re gonna keep mouthing off  then say it to where I can hear it,”  as if it were all so easy as that,  as if did we only have the chest to shout a little louder we might yet come upon the hidden word   sure untangle  these our many mutterings. 

Boat on the Road  which would explain this  infernal chafing at the hull  of things, how halting  what little progress  we manage to scrape down this unending  interstate. That roar?  Another freshly tuned  inboard frothing the air, far from sea- sick and chomping at the bit for more horsepower.

The Game They see your next move. They see   the one after that too, clever   as you are in nosing the loophole   dangled to snag such clever  rascals as you. Time played  its hand and you were born, woke  to find yourself at a table  not your own, theirs to tilt   as the roll sees fit. The only play they can’t predict is when you slide back your chair, forfeiting your turn to give yourself time to grieve  the long years wasted learning  the rules, and then—your grief having framed itself into a door— bow through it, and quit.   

POULTRY PARASITE CHECK Flipped upside down they go  the way of daylight's flutter,  heat’s perennial scratch  for provisions: still. Not the limp  neck of submission but suspended  quill, raindrop’s pause to swell in its gleaning down the window- sill,  carpenter bee hovering before  the hole—bold quiet  of gauntlet thrown, silent bugle blown to the hand  that grips the world like a chalice   and upends it, parting the feathers:  by all means, see if you can  find the life you suspect weathers the tumult, hidden here.

FUNERAL We are head, shoulders,  knees, and toes, strung together by star-twinkle and the lilting light of ABC’s. Row as we might,  may we never drift so far as to dream otherwise.