L.R. Harvey Poetry

BECOMING 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  in the kitchen as a shelf for jars of dry rice. It might make a nice  visor when the sun is out,  or propped up become a camp shelter  for GI Joe to climb under when it rains. What it won’t make  is a home 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 camping in, this soul  you’ll be dragging back and forth  across the commencement stage of your life until you finally graduate into the understanding that alma mater  means bounteous mother , womb 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 his pocket, but for all that  he stays sweating on the stoop,  veins thick as green beans as he leans and contorts his body, heroic under the strain of his refusal to admit that for all our late-afternoon grit, our penchant for one-trip wonders, what's worth troubling the table nearly always begs more than a bit of doubling back.

BECOMING      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 guttural purr of Cat machinery, shuffle down their drives  to mingle by the mailbox and deliver to all open ears their collection of kin and what women want while the county digs up the road  to lay a sewer line they were fine without.  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 connection all their own,  refusing to be silently disposed.  Down at the mailbox stories click  into place not like concrete conclusions but woodsmoke, root- scent, wing whisper and horizon, like  a recipe ruined if written down. So many things we don't know, can't find a detour to work around, but we've been this way enough to say that if the world may yet be saved it will not be in a lab or at the end of a paved road, but in the slow, gravel communion of the left behind, ...

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 granddaughter 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.