L.R. Harvey Poetry

All There Is Having slipped again our net of word- weave, the wild thing we were hoping to noose feels safe enough in the silence to peer out from the brush behind the house, nose probing for a scent. For years now it has  dispensed the crackers from our traps,  stepped nimbly over metaphor cranked tight like a trigger plate,  mocked each fresh attempt at a flock  regardless how we fortified  the coop, flinging down-feathers  like breadcrumbs for us to follow over the field, beyond the brambles.   For all we know, it's like as not tunneled beneath the house’s foundation by now, making porous the packed clay of our permanence. We can name it,  but that is not its name. We can call it  our pet, but it will not come  when called. Is this, then, the end of all  our being here, to coexist in glimpses  and supposals, certain only that a hollow   so deep doesn't burrow itself, that to be  unceasingly looked for is—at th...

Leaving City Limits On the special occasion that the words fit right, and amber light cloaks the elm the way a wedding dress becomes a kind of second skin; when August thins to September and the dew-point loosens  its corset till it’s possible to believe in breath again, with all the deep that it might  make; when, without a doubt, the words  fit so unbelievably right as to invite more  than our knees to quake, as if time shuffled  its feet and the callused heel of the world  snagged a loose thread in the tapestry  to show eternity’s stitch, a sparrow cloud curving like a comma on the evening’s page, brief  inhalation to prepare for what comes next—  it’s less the bump of pulling in, quiet  click of arrival as the motor stills,  and more the soft tread of footsteps   on a road again, that two-way blessing   of a horizon with a suggestive curve  we can make towards but isn’t yet         ...

What's Between Before we were here they cut 27 straight through the frayed fringe  of the federal battlefield, left behind  a vine of withered Georgia towns  dangling like drought peaches  from an asphalt stem: Rossville,  Chickamauga, Rock Spring, Lafayette. Walker County mows the median  once, at most, each other month,  but the municipalities bend the budget  to keep theirs tight and low, so much so  that were you not from here  you still might drive through  without a map to clarify what’s  what, and—using only the length   of wheatgrass as a reference—know the named thresholds of your goings, what’s left between and unincorporated the thing  that grows,                                           goes on growing.

Dixie Plate  The Tibetan Buddhist monk bows  his weight against the levers of a yellow  Cub Cadet outside the temple plopped off Highway 27, that asphalt bayonet  piercing through the Chickamauga Battlefield  and a potluck of Baptist, tinfoil towns.  Fall, and late September sun glints off the sweat of his bronzed head as the draped sleeves of his blood-red robes  scoop the breeze that swirls beneath  his twelve foot golden god  staring down the ribboned flag of the neighbor's Rebel one. The air is orange with incense of fresh-cut grass, low  om of motor, mower circling  like a mantra. There is a pattern t o it all, but the lines are indiscernible from here.  And are we surprised if—given  this abundance, and just one trip  through the line—the flavors are bound to rise and spill the binds sectioning our disposable plate, edges casseroling into one, indefinable Yes , home-baked? 

The Tract Nothing so expansive as to know  the heavy head of fields on which I stamped my name but cannot make the time to mow. Nothing so vast as to yield  each harvest a bumper crop  of envelopes offering to shave a corner off for cash, to seed into the under- growth of all my goings questions of inheritance. Neither so confined where from the center point of porch  I can trace the lines with the compass of my eye, a plot so manageable  as to slip into believing the world  spins smooth as a globe and not  the finger-spun acorn jumping  across the ridges of a picnic table. Space to lament how little gas  in this mower, how many gaps in this attempt at a fence, boundaries  enough to know the roots of what's mine and share the branches with the neighbor, the sky. Tent, apartment, or ranch,  it's a roughly three-acre life I'm after.

  Beowulf: A Fresh Translation A dozen days instead of years,  but who in this feather-flung haze  is counting? Each evening one less  mounting the roost,  tucking wings against a coming sure  as night itself, clucking what wordless things  beg sounding before the door swings shut   and the woods awake. What liquid suns we brood upon, what potential we warm in the fragile hope of a hatch before it’s time: metallic click of a latch,  masked shadow shaping through a crack we didn't think to fortify. Come morning down-feathers will scuttle silently  across the field like ships on a breeze.  So this, then, Hrothgar, is what brought you     to your knees, another clipped and ruffled king  perched on the promontory, watching the sea.

What Time Is It?  Now is rocks and sticks to buy a bit of bark, ache no rub can reach from burden no words can, long night of labor to greet in morning light the unbearable weight of cradled  air. Now is prophetic  patch of thinning hair, glob  stuck deep in the chest, kernel wedged back  a ways between the wisdom teeth, slow wheeze of incessant scratch. Sure, now too  is honeysuckle drop, wild  blackberry thatch, but don't get it twisted: we're still under seige. Best eat the family dog  or bury it out back before they enter  as they please without a knock,  bring it back with a pill  and fill the official larder. Plenty of ways to be a martyr still. But thick, meaty laughter?  If it comes it comes after. 

New Fixture The saw is simpler to find  than the courage to cut  a hole in what's forever been shut. Then comes going blind in the downfall of dust. There is a point in all of this when even tender-toeing joists  in the muggy glow of a head- lamp is ground more sure than tracing back  the power source not pulling power  anymore, the shear power  to snip it for good. Drill the box into wood then twist in the new. All this for the same mess, the same living room, but to what lengths of what's coiled in us won't we go for an amber chance at belief in the glow of a different hue?

Re-homing What I remember is how in the name of being humane we used a live trap, lured him with a nutty bit  of delicious where he feasted till his famine tripped the lever and clanged the cage. What I remember next is  the rage, how there in the back of my dad’s suburban he smashed back and forth in primal tantrum till blood dripped  from the pulp of his nose and he lay panting on his side, unable to stand.  Back then I couldn't understand.  I can’t remember if he lived or died, just that undying flicker of something like star-fire in the  black hole of his eye. 

We Were Here Days flash and fall like sprinkler  drops, pop like soap bubbles on the sun-warmed hood of a car.  Come morning, dead bodies will line the bottom of a jar unless we let the lightning out.  Someone's daughter turns four tomorrow, and a sparrow cloud graduates  over the pine copse to leave us  grasping at the glimmer of what’s already flickering in further fields.  I believe some can do it, the kind of presence where all stills and the moment names eternity its alibi,  but the closet I've come is this   sense that I can almost feel the photograph developing, and on it the damning evidence of  thumbprints, matching ours.