Understanding Your Old Man

— for Emerson, Eden, and Shiloh

Things are 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 laundry. 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 tear, 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, dragging

my fingers through the dirt

like a neanderthal, ears sharp

for the dry rasp which is

the brittle edge of a scab

that wants to picked and pulled

till the timeless seeps out.

L.R. Harvey Poetry