L.R. Harvey Poetry

BECOMING, AGAIN There really is so much you can do  with a high school diploma: make  a ramp for your matchbox cars, or  get some brackets and hang it  on a wall as a shelf for jars of rice. It might make a nice  visor when the sun is out,  or propped up become a tipi  for a miniature you to climb under when it rains. What it won’t make  is a house for someone of your  stature, or—try as you might to coax  it in the air—a magic carpet  to carry you there. No, it’s still this  body you’ll be living in, this soul  you’ll be dragging back and forth  across the stage of your life until it finally learns that alma mater  means generous mother, in whom we’re never not being born.

GROCERIES A hot one for sure, the key into bliss of air conditioning a sharp pang in her pocket, but for all that  she remains sweating on the stoop,  her veins thick as green beans as she leans and contorts her body, heroic under the strain of her refusal to admit that for all our late-afternoon grit, our penchant for one-trip wonders, what's worth the table nearly always begs some doubling back.

LATE MAY Days flash and fall like sprinkler  drops, pop like soap bubbles on the sun-warmed hood of a car.  Come morning dead bodies will line the bottom of a jar—still, who wants to be the one to let the lightning out? Not so much a question as a shout: sparrow cloud graduating over the pine copse, tell me it's possible to be here before we're left grasping at the glimmer of what's already flickering in further fields.

BECOMING                — for my sophomores (now seniors...) Till finally, after long years of waffling through the wardrobes in everyone else’s walk-ins,  and finding, yes, a good accessory or two, but nothing that fits you  with that it factor so evident  when draped over their bones,  you at last submit to return to your own, thin closet worse for wear, where— though  you can’t see it yourself, your back  turned—the mirror watches  as you slip into the skin that wraps you so right you thought you had nothing on.

FULL TABLE What to call this peculiar strain of ache, the fruit heavy of late and the evening light sagging to brush dew off the grass. Is an abundance  that hurts a sign of birth  or just a bad back, some other lack? Sure, the Big Chill is sure to visit soil even this far South, so I’m not, say, wishing  it would get here now , but when the flesh of those in other climes  is even now falling off the vine,  this full table feels dense  as a cross. Overstuffed  into hunger, I’m at a loss.

THE RESISTANCE For weeks now the old men rise  to the low purr of Cat machinery  and shuffle down their driveways  to mingle by the mailbox, weaving kin and has-beens 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 they will develop— out of sheer, sinewy resilience—an unstudied means of commun ication  all their own, refusing to be silently disposed. Down a t the mailbox the stories  click into place like the faded clichés  on the church signs. If the world may yet be saved it will not be in a lab or at the end of a main road but in the slow, gravel stories of the left behind, told  right under the long nose of the developers in a language they forced on us, and—for all their many ears— could never understand.

Walker County Council Meeting: May 1st After the point-man for the Brownfield Grant  unearthed for us just how sick the soil  at Chickamauga’s shuttered Crystal Springs Mill, which is itself an Eden still  compared to the old steel plant in Rossville down the road, the County Development  Committee still had the nerve to request  that the rest of the 80-acre tract out back  of Lafayette’s Noble district be rezoned  as industrial turf— more jobs was the blurb.   In the 10 minutes cleared for neighbors  to defend what pasture they’ve made of their lives, Bobby Baker bleated  concerns about his 300-foot well as well  as his children, and Nina Gilstrap asked  where, with predominantly South-facing  wind, all that pollution was certain to blow.  But then the poison is slow, and more  information must surely be gathered to adequately cloud our vision  before we make so rash a thing  as an obvious decision, s...

TRANSPARENCIES Over the vacant green we draped a thin net of rivers, set the land rippling with names turning in on themselves like eddies. Mountains went over that,  ranges mapping the vast distance  between our desks and the thin air of all we had yet to know. Next  capital cities, migration pattern of native  species, crop rotation, annual rainfall,  dialects. During the test, though,  when all of it was layered together, piled on the late-afternoon hunger of our lives,  the only answer many of us could provide in the allotted time was that there’s a famine somewhere in the region whose borders we suddenly cannot seem to trace.

Discontinuing the Penny Bordering absurd, just how many  miles the bluebird will traverse, back  and forth with a pine needle or a rogue  piece of lace, another cast-off thing  refusing quite to equate, not unlike my dad's repeated returns to Home Depot to buy a miter saw and a project plank, a pint of blue paint, gallons of gas exhausted to spend what’s left  of a Thursday afternoon building  with his grandaughter an eight-inch house  stuck on a copper pole with a hole.  Despite our best attempts to balance  accounts, what do we make  of the fact that quite none of it seems to add up, the remainder hanging   around like loose pennies in a pocket? How lucky, one day, we will know ourselves to be, to have jingled a while  in a world of such costly inefficiencies.