L.R. Harvey Poetry

The Tinkerer: Biography           Beginning: 1990-something            Terminus: He'll get around to it Neither skilled nor unskilled. Not so much a lack  of love for things finished but an eye  for too much that needs finishing. He knows what he builds will not stay forever built, but does not find the hardware of that truth sufficient to hold  back his hammer. When he hears  the song sundered, the grammar  lilting left, his tune is troubled. He is deaf  enough both not to know what went awry  and to try. Regarding this and that,  here and there, the split hairs  of what and why, he does not find them irreparably sundered. Why not me? he often wonders. Sometimes he weeps when he works. Laughter, too.  The pointed rage of a dropped screw.  No one calls it craftsmanship but he gets by   with good. The further beyond  his means the need the more piercing ...

Heaven There's nothing wrong with "getting in," but if ours was a kinship with a ticket at the end, like I were the bouncer you flounced up to and flirted with, eyes flitting always over my shoulder into the inner  room of the exclusive night club,  I would not say I knew you, or we were friends. And if you were a bit more savvy,  for weeks or even years returning to ask me  about my family, tell me the latest of  yours, till you couldn't hide your boredom and tried to push in past me to receive your great reward, I would still not stamp you as one  of my own. For that I would need to be  the end of your waiting, my eyes  your flashing lights, my name in your mouth the only cup to carry you to the dawn.

  Wind-chimes To think I’ve lived     f or all this time with cataracts                 shaped like wind-chimes in both eyes.       That first, gifted pair were the surgeon’s       soft, melodious  fingers folding      back the cloud.  I see them       everywhere now.

Five Points Spur The intersection called Five Points Spur  was designed—as I imagine it— with a mind to manufacture the jolt  which comes of having looked death in its one working eye and scraped out just alive all by the time  you drop your kid off at school or make it to your hair appointment; designed, that is, to dig its heel into the fat rump  of a Tuesday to see if—with a jump— it’s still got some get-up- and-go.  I’d like to meet the guy who said  Here, Here, Here, There, Here, then disappeared into the pines or beneath the bracken hill to watch what happens when a few tilted stop signs and a fistful of chances to change course meet. Is he amazed at the matter, or even then was it in his knowing  that with a few false starts, the occasional  crunch, for the most part the most of us  will get where we’re going?

Night Build Because the day was mis-measured  and cut short before I could  take this block of being and saw it  square, so now I’m here, thinking how  it’s all a matter of this nattering  mattering , how much past that  the dim-light of this dim head- lamp won’t illuminate. Whirling galaxies shot from the shoot of a miter saw. Whirling droplets of lightning bug in every sun- sneeze. Something snuffling  unseen along the woodline. It’s fine,  isn’t it, how little we can build or fix within our stare, how still  it settles on our lips and in our lungs: with every breath  the stars shift, the firmament responds.

  Understanding Your Old Man  — for Emerson, Eden, and Shiloh It's all held together, of course,   but loosely as an infant’s head  held. Sometimes, when the horizon  is wet and heavy with towels  and fat vowels of sweaters, the black comma of socks, a breeze  unlocks the light fabric of the blue  fishing shirt, which lifts open  like a gate that I duck through  into the world so poorly hidden right there on the other end  of the laundry line. And sometimes,    dragging across the evening over the trampoline a stitch of geese so long a pine could snag it like a suture,  and if it did the tender, orange flesh  of Tuesday would surely open, dumping its intestines on our heads  till we were good and sloppy  with God. At the old place we peeled up the laminate  and found hardwood. Since then  I give it my all to hang on  to hangnails and shuffle slow, drag fingers through the dirt...

Pursuit I grieve the way my dog relieves  himself after nipping half a rotisserie  from the counter: not a clean pinch or pile but scooted across the yard  in smatterings and smears  that double back till its far from clear just where it began.  It's how I hope, too. In the book St. Patrick stands  with a staff and a sack at the root  of a road unspooling like God’s hair  or the slow drift of a loose lash into the Irish Hills. My daughter reads the silence and says I know you want to be that guy.  It’s okay. You’re the person you get to be, then proceeds to spill her water  and return me to myself, on my knees and shuffling on the endless trail  of all the mess and miracle that won't be held or bottled up.