L.R. Harvey Poetry

The Prophets Say the Road the Seers See but then there are those of us who best know our knowing  as the glob stuck deep in the chest  or the kernel wedged back a ways between the wisdom  teeth, who cannot cough it up or condescend to choke it down  but must instead live out  the slow wheeze of our days  with the constant scratch  of an asterisk to a footnote  only read with the feet.

  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  the longer you hang around  here, but compared to what it will run you 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 here we know too well to name or say just 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 finish no matter how much we stare out the window.