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. The world tilts at a shaper pitch here, 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 drywall 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 lazy 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 trusses for ...

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 myths that slice to pare the bone from all that's summer-soft. All hail  the shaggy neck of fields uncollared, the dog  set free to wander off, the wait for that late- evening return at last unleashed to be  love, scratching at the back door crowned in grass-spur and spittle.

Supporting Cast Prone as we are to lose the line in the suck and swirl of such  a rush, I tell them that a story of this force  requires 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—whether  they know it or not—like good river rock, to keep the current moving where it ought. It’s a long ways away,  but suffice for now to say  if there’s a quiz they might be an option but for sure won’t be the answer. And  for those of you prone to hate the thought of anyone left behind, just imagine  their fulfillment were they to one day find their whole being was margined  in a story, that this, dear class, was art , and what more centrality could any border-dweller desire than to kn...

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.

Raza A flaming thumb cracks the hardback of horizon , opening to us a complex  text, the knotted kind with a pine- scented secret that will not bare its breast to any quick cut. Here  is the lover who wants to be  wanted, the puzzle that solves us as we tear down the house looking  for the missing piece. “My piece I leave with you” we were told once, felt the cool weight of a Rosetta Stone pressed into  our palms; it was so flat, so familiar, we couldn't resist and skipped it  across the water. The miracle is not an answer or a clear bridge to the other side, but how the ripples will not disappear,  how even 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 ...

Foot Cramps 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. Sinking,  toes forever flex for the firm of final things in the breath-taking  suck and swirl of all this almost.

The Tinkerer’s Shed  Most every tool has a home  here, this tin-roofed tangle suspended somewhere between upended and just ordered enough to gesture toward somebody knowing what’s what. Levels hang crooked from a pegboard; a box of loose wrenches tightens down one corner of a scraggle-toothed 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 hobbled things  and the unshakeable duty of being shaped with shims on our wrists. Past that, in this rust and rattle you'll not unearth a more clear and terminal task than this.