L.R. Harvey Poetry

  Attic  What I like is how you can see beneath  the veil of paint and plaster, couch  cushion and lamplight, can see how the soft illusion of home is just insulation  stuffed between studs some guy with a belt nailed  together at the right angles. It's a sharper pitch, reality, when you’re up there, crouched beneath steel teeth reaching for the tender meat  of your scalp, but I like how I can say  just what part of me aches, can trace back the truss beneath the fluff and know just what I'm reaching for. And then, it’s even nice to remember how easy it would be to fall beneath what I once thought the floor, tearing through  the drywall to find myself indistinguishable  from any other well-meaning pile of dust  who thought he knew where to trust his weight.

Building Science Before you knew about air-sealing,  how conditioned air slips through t he ceiling where the top-plates j oint the walls and through all the other holes for wire, venting,  and the like, the house was built  right. Before, of a given afternoon, some uninvited word peeled back  the insufficient insulation of your life   to show you just how much was being  lost, how far from code you’d strayed, (or rather, how laughably thin the code has become  for what they'll pass these days,) you might have kicked back the easy chair and passed for something like content, ignorant of just how inefficiently  breath leaks between your ribs,  just how much you're paying for it. But now, the illusion of structurally sound  torn down to the studs, there’s no going back. You're forever a fugitive in your own house, wind wracking this wasteland you wander. At least boredom is a solid option no longer, your days stretched out l ike tr...

De-fencing Not a sword but a T-post, blade sunk  deep not in stone but North Georgia  drought that may as well be. If I manage  to dislodge it I will not be king  but one finger closer to freeing the field from the rusted grip of the old fence. It’s late October, air thin  enough to believe in stories that slice to reveal the raw beneath what's summer-soft. All hail  the shaggy neck of fields uncollared, the dog  set free to wander off, the wait, the weight, the late- evening return at last unleashed to be    love, crowned in grass-spur and spittle.

Side Characters Prone as we are to lose the line in the suck and swirl of such deeps,  I tell them that a story of this force  begs you let certain names flow past  like leaf-fall or bits of twig: the woman  who fills the wine, the old friend  of a father’s with a good horse, the inn-keep  who fends away the night for a night.  It’s not negligence, I say, and not  that they’re not important, but keep  in mind they’re here—know it  or not—to keep the current moving  to the ocean. It’s a long ways away,  but if there’s a quiz they might be an option but for sure won’t be the answer.  We never finish by the bell.    In their trickle into the eddy  of the sophomore hall, one or two  of them sees fit to say  “thanks,  Mr. Harvey,” then disappears downstream  before I can turn and catch who.

Encore  — for Aiden That guitar riff won’t tie her parents back together . Those strings aren't strong enough  to tune the world tight. But no one here  has any doubt we are witnesses  of a most blesséd union: that smile, that sway,  her fingers knotting the higher frets  of all that’s frayed in us. By the power  vested in her, what God has brought together let no man do other than open his hands and forever hold this peace.

[Untitled] What we have here this morning, a bright thumb once again opening the hardback of horizon , is a complex  text, the knotted kind with a pine- scented secret that will not bare its breast to any quick cut .  This is the lover who wants to be  wanted, who wants to see you sweat for it, the puzzle that solves you  as you tear up the house in long afternoons looking for the missing piece. “My piece I leave with you” we were told once as the box closed, felt the cool weight of a Rosetta Stone pressed into our palms; it was so flat we couldn't resist and skipped it a cross the water. The miracle is not an answer  or a clear bridge to the other side but how the ripples will not disappear,  how the stars refuse to quit dancing on the surface of our diminishment, the light bubbling and babbled but buoyant, not yet lost in translation.

New Lamp It's not that I like the old, have a penchant for plated gold and Chinese, painted porcelain. If God had to twist his arm at this angle  to reach beneath the shade and let there be  light, I’d mutter Jesus , collapse  on the couch, and make it all new, too . My fear is that given how things get a bit tangled here, and being young enough to assume this won't be our last lamp, old enough to know I won't remember it in a year or two, if we remove this pillar of the living  room who's to say we aren't also throwing away our daughter waiting in the bathtub for a towel, you with a paint trowel still wet in your hands and big plans to tackle the basement come spring? These foundations of ours are tilted things, the world we raised forever collapsing  like a Jenga game to rebuild in the light of a new piece. Even now the mums from your sister’s shower are wilting on the porch. I’ll put them out with the lamp, just hold my hand so at least I can pretend ...

[Untitled] I’m almost from here, but not  quite. And what I mean by that  lives always one street over  from what I write. I used to lie awake and ache  to know just how it would be to be  the guy the girl I want wants,  how he must feel full and finished,   like the meaty bite  of wood- smoke I still imagine poetry tastes like. The world is a window  and we've called ourselves over to see for ourselves, always arriving on the tail end of the fawn ducking the thicket, the porpoise pod going dark  to leave us gesturing in the general  direction of absence. Plenty of strangeness here, but what's not odd is how we wake in the night with foot cramps: Sinking,  toes forever flex for the firm of final things in the breath-taking  suck and swirl of all this almost.

In the Tinkerer’s Shed  Most every tool has a home  here, this tin-roofed tangle suspended somewhere between upended and just order enough to suspect  that someone knows what’s what.  Levels hang crooked from a peg board; a box of loose wrenches tightens down one corner of a toothless table saw ; leaned on the wall   and looking down from the loft  a constellation of scraps bear weighty thoughts of all they might one day mean.  What’s thicker than dust here  is a sturdy faith in tilted things  and the unshakeable duty of being born with shims on our wrists. What’s missing, like the one nut ne eded to take this rust and rattle and cinch it all right,  is a clear and terminal task.