L.R. Harvey Poetry

[Untitled] The door opened on the opened neck  of a White Leghorn cracking a grin, fleshy as the raw wound of the world  for which some of us weep  and others head straight to the shed for the shovel. There is, of course, the work ahead: reinforce the coop, tie tight the chinks through which a paw  might reach, look for words that neither lie nor tell the lay of it   to children who want to know what happens  to more than birds. What there isn’t  is making sense of this, just  the making, always the making, mess  by which we might yet meet  the warm press of fingers  folding us into ourselves and out  of ourselves into the fold  where we perch awhile, heads tucked like little lumps of clay waiting  for the light to take shape.

Marshlands I do not think my grandfather ever pressed an oyster shell into my palm,  with fingers callused from crab traps  wrapped my little ones into a fist  around it as we stood on his dock in the Beaufort River. I do not think  this ever occurred, though I can feel  the moment’s sharp edges, smell the pluff mud  my dad buried himself under as a kid  to scare Scott Dennis, thick stuff  beneath which his dad would gladly have been  buried despite his long-calcified love  for the Presbyterian fold. Truth  is always at stake, but what won’t we make to trace these tributaries we washed up from,  explain this chafing to make something  beautiful of the grain on our tongues? 

Wardrobe An undeniable thrill, first chill  of September’s false fall or that week  in early April suggesting the thaw  you wouldn't let yourself imagine  then, as if the world left unlocked the changing room and you fumbled in  to catch the curve of her bare back, turned. Before you back out the door again, sure that something this good is a sure sign you aren't meant to be here, tell me, h ow would it change things were you to find out it wasn't an accident, that she knew the whole time it was you coming? Would you finally quit apologizing? Would you maybe, even, make love?

Even With All These Legs, Running is Not an Option  What I know is there is still a way  of being here, a free-swinging fidelity like the leggy basement spiders bouncing cooly in strings strung  between duct and drywall every time  the air kicks on. What I know  is there is yet a way to suspend oneself   securely in the unseen, even when today or tomorrow the world will pick us up to feel our little bodies go pop , a way to go about the waiting like one lingering by the ballot box whose vote has long been cast: when it’s time, you’ll find me where  you found me last. What I know  is the solution is never as neat as cutting the cord or weaving one more stitch to plug the gap and catch the missing drop  of dew. This is what I know. What I need i s what stray bits of knowing you've happened to snag in your corner over there, and you,   and you, and you.

The Fear That the time comes and I’m ready,  walk tall to the table with a cocked-back hook and clock him mid-sip of milk right in the jaw, am escorted out  in the firm grip of the principal  to little or no cafeteria applause  as I make my way to dine  on the sumptuous feast reserved for the principled, that exclusive  back room to which I have punched  my ticket with the teeth of—wait, it was Connor West who said it,  not Wise?—the wrong guy.  Fear is a mystery meat, and hard to pin down, but it’s something  like this, or how I might just as easily hear the nasty, whispered thing  and slip my hand back in my pocket,  refusing to get involved,  meandering these endless halls until I forget both my anger and my name, responding only  to the intercom paging the locker number  they gave me when I enrolled.  

Alternate Ending Then just when you thought it might go on like this forever, that pitter-patter  all but fading into the white noise of the living  room, the world will of a sudden cease its incessant circling around this fraying corner   of the universe, not with a screech or bone-melting burst of flame but with the soft  groan of one who has finally found their place. All the same, we will look up, then, from our various  busyness of being here, hands raw and chapped from our attempts to scrub clean this unending pile of reasons for it all, and something more  than the soft flap of our ears will flutter in recognition, perking as if—at a register  previously inaccessible to us—our names  are being called.

Missing You gave the words strict instructions to look both ways before crossing the line, not to do anything you taught them otherwise, and—above all— not to run off  in pubescent independence and leave  the poem tottering behind. Needless to say the words have returned, muttering something about how it was just there a second ago. You've been knocking  on every door since, begging  for even a scrap of what they might have heard, and doing the best you can  to suppress the rising panic as you lose  what’s left of this waning light.

Edges Lack of funds, likely, or maybe, like a teacher  in public, lack of desire to be seen on date night. Either way,  turns out they rarely write names on the back- side o f graves, which is all the same  for the public works employee edging the fence line, who periodically sets down the weed-eater for a drink and another stare long enough to etch his own  into stone, as if to feel the cool, moist weight of anonymity salve the scorch  of what’s left of the thick tangle  still bordering our work here.