L.R. Harvey Poetry

  Tipping Point About the soul’s mid-June, roughly,  (were there an inner almanac  beside the Farmer’s on the shelves to help us chart the rhythms  of ourselves,) that even the most meticulous  pincher of pokeweed, snapper of shoots,  de-rooter of dandelion is of a sudden laid up with the Summer scratch, returning  only to discover that—blame it on ill luck, this rain, our partners not pulling their weight—we’re fucked.  There’s no coming back from this.  It’s only then, despite our neglect,   call it mid-July by the same predictor of patterns, that we step out  nonetheless to pick the first leaves   of lettuce, wicker basket of beans.  What we don’t get to pick  is what it all means, though ours    this earthen bowl, the homegrown mix, drowning as it is in vinaigrette.

Hardware What the customer knows is that he’s looking for something loosely shaped like a U that nailed up could help bracket the sagging  from the bottom. Not quite like that  but sort of like the thing you see people use to cinch together shelving, like the kind in your college dorm, or maybe wire would work fine in a pinch, but it’s more  a question of fitting between—what are those pieces called that run sort of like this  behind the drywall?—those things. What the owner knows after years of circling aisles to pluck the nail with a head just right for the hammer to hit, is that if there were   a word that clomped through the door with the confidence to say just what it is we're looking for, we’d be sure to get home only to find it not quite the fit  for the head-scratching angles of this, our inimitably particular project.

Ladder Truck Uncertified to drive the rig, a mechanic flipped the ladder truck—the county’s  only one—and clambered out to watch what he’d done flame a false sunset over Glass Mill Road in Chickamauga.    Commissioner Teems was quick to douse  the blame on former chairman Whitfield’s  penny-saving aspirations for the 1.8 million tax-payers must now dig up to procure  a new truck, and this time, she ensures us, insured . Sure,  Chief Hodge admits, we could save  a few bucks by going used, but it’ll be  more than your bucks you’ll want saving  when it’s your second-story window  sending up signals. It is the shiniest issue on hand tonight, but an old  question: How much of ourselves is wise  to expend in insuring against the certainty of the roof caving in? Put another way,  when in late innings the distant storm decides of a sudden to be less distant and lightning first tries its disguise as a blink over the bal...

Campaign After a heartfelt but vanilla comment regarding how flavorful  property tax has become of late,  the bailiff followed me out  at my early departure muttering he’d like a word. Outside  the courthouse he conferred  beneath his breath and badge his encouragement that I consider a run for the District One Commission  Seat, how Judy O’neal down at the station in Fort O. could get  my message out o n the news, which would be neat to do if I knew what my message was and had a plan other than a county-wide invitation to sit on the porch  as we try to decipher the morse code the fireflies flash over the field,  that missive I've come to suspect is the one to make clear just what it is  we're all paying toward by being here.  

Public Record A county council is not unlike the telephone company: service  is spotty, but it’s all you get  around here. 25 years back now they cut 27 through the frayed fringe of the battlefield, opening Chattanooga  Valley, Rossville, Chickamauga,  Rock Spring, and Lafayette like an ulcer  to invite flow in and out, juiced  the residents in taxes to make up  a few lanes of deficit, and found instead  a string of withered Georgia towns  dangling like drought peaches  from an asphalt stem. Still, every first Thursday a handful  of residents gather to say what matters to them, staking their hopes  and grievances like plot lines in the plat map clarifying all that's not their lives . Faced now with the question  of how both to be and go  somewhere, Jerry Pope points  during public comment to the example  of the old Rayford Road he takes home they want to pave or shut down, due to its low visibility: “Just ca...

Visitor Word has grazed among the deer that July at last has sheared the split ends of the crabapple next to the trampoline,  and in lean packs of three or four they come like ghosts to make amends for long weeks of this heat. Tonight, though, just one  comes doeing from the federal protection  of the Chickamauga battlefield, slipping between lightning-bug blinks in steps light as bird-thought or that pine-scented secret the dead whisper amongst themselves. Hush: this is the closest we’ll get on our side of the screened-in  porch to the word that means the musk of being here, that phantom tick itching us  mad enough to jump our apportioned pasture for a chance at that sour-sweet crunch. 

Contentment Not all that hard, really, given you  never leave the house or happen to know anyone who talks about things they do.  So long as you never chance to look  out the window or look in  a mirror or pick up a book  other than the memoir you’ll self- publish when you get around to it,  you’ll be fine, assuming you’re not mailed the neighbor’s utility bill or see the neighbor through a chink in the fence or of an evening watch the geese vanish over the pine copse  in silent assertion that other places  exist. None of that relentless repentance  shit, sheer grit that living takes and fading too, unless you’re one of those children of men who can’t seem to find a world to call their own.

Trellised The best yield the garden bore was before  we soiled it with seed, before the natives  became weeds because we didn't plant them  there and the fence was yet stacked  in lumber racks at the hardware store  with a chance still at perfectly plumb.  Our significant others, too, kept their figures  firm as a fresh cucumber twenty years  into our marriages before we met  them, their priorities in prim rows  well-tilled and running parallel to our own.  The summers were never oppressively  hot, the spouses were, and the houses rarely  needed repair, till we—our very real  bodies with their very real hungers tiptoeing for the glint of it all at the top  of the trellis—found the rotten egg in the cardinal's nest perched in the bean vines, that tangle on which matter insists.

World Straddling TDOT is expanding the I-24/75 split from Chattanooga to Atlanta, an extra lane  each way, and Gracie and I too tax ourselves of an afternoon constructing possible directions our lives could merge  to ease our daily commute through the world. We love our rural plot this side of the state line, but there are times  we’d be happy to exchange some deer  for neighbors nosing by  with strollers, chatting loose and free  as all the free money Tennessee is rolling out  to attend private school, like the one  at which I teach and where our kids  will likely be. But then, of course,  there’s the peach trees we planted beginning to bear, Emmie’s excitement  to begin preschool at the First Baptist Church we don’t attend but would gladly be dunked in the honey dripping from that twang, and then—that troubling pit in the middle— the question of why we can't be comfortable in the dragging afternoon silence of ourselves. More stat...

Palm to Pay Deemed nigh neanderthal to dig  into a purse or pocket for the plastic long since replacing the paper so clumsy to unclamp and then—by all  accounts—to count , now the red line reads like an oracle the pathways   of our palms, foretelling not a future but a number unlocking the numbers to our name. We file through  with our bags all the same, each feigning awe at this newest audacity, like so  many deferring fathers who never dared a word  to the boy in the house whispering  words to his daughter, but who were certain, come Monday, to big-mouth about the sheer disrespect of stepping into the living room  to find that tousled head canoodling with his princess on the lazy  chair, bare feet kicked up on the table which didn't feel the need to jump a bit at being caught in the act of defiling his very flesh.