L.R. Harvey Poetry

Footnote The prophets say and the seers see, but then there are those who best know their knowing  as the glob stuck deep in the chest  or the kernel wedged back a ways between the wisdom  teeth, who cannot hack it up or choke it down but must live out the slow wheeze of their days  with the incessant scratch of the asterisk swallowed in their hunger for an explanation.

  FESCUE Grass seed has gone up  by the bag. Not that it hasn’t always  asked at least a long afternoon  of your life loosening that old patch you once thought thick enough, but now you’ll need a lusher wad of green as well. Hell, everything costs more  of you the longer you hang around  here, but compared to what it will run to uproot it all and take off for the lawn you’ve long  been hearing about over there, even a truckload  of the staying stuff is still practically free.  

The Hike What is the operative word  for what occurs when the stick  across the trail proves less twig than tail? There’s one too, I’m sure,  for how it feels to look back at the inches between where your footfall fell and Hell, but it’s shrouded in leaf litter.  They slither off, the ones we're after, before we can identify  the exact tilt of their heads or the pattern  etched on their backs, leaving us  with nothing more than the gift  of engorged veins and a whittled eye  as we pick our way down the path  again, surrounded, surely, and alive.

LANDING First the jolt of touching down,  then the slow peeling of the mask  to squint around at the rest of us  squinting around to discover that— despite what the itinerary claims— there is just here with bangs, the same state we know too well to name or clarify why we can't get out the door without bringing it with us in our carry-ons, like that old autobiography we can’t seem to close no matter how much we stare out the open window.