L.R. Harvey Poetry

Getting There All this weaving and wagging  like a wound-up metallic tail or a trailer bounced off its ball, your bald head  wrinkled against the glass  for a passing glimpse  of that great Ahead you hunger  for, that planet just past the of heat shimmer where  the burning in your lead foot  will be quenched at last  and all the beers sip cold  to the bottom of the can,  that North Georgia Eden with a hole in it the shape of your Dodge Ram into which you vanish somewhere beyond the black cloud   we linger in. I saw you just one other time, about five minutes later when we sat dead- still, side by side at the red light  on Battlefield, the unchanging one  that doesn’t seem to belong  but never asks what we think. We idled next to one another an eternity while over the shadow  of a pine-perched crow light broke both of our windshields.

The Tinkerer's Daughter Fixes Things      or, Learning to Pump Then after months of flopping around  she felt it, hope tightening  with her tummy as all 29 pounds and pigtails curved like a pink comma on the pollened page of air where she paused,   then flew forward like the latter half  of the thoughts that come barreling   from the class-five of her mouth in the car after school, so fast  she nearly snagged  her bare foot on the cloud’s  crab-claw, which no one saw—her father  in the shed, her mother flipping  sweet potato fries for dinner— so she climbed down   and ran to where the dog elongated in equinox light, leaned over to rest  her hands on the sun-warmed barrel  of his chest and shouted into his ear flopped like a cup to catch what bubbled there, Odie, I just learned how  to pump, to which didn’t jump up or howl his hooray but just lay  without reply, though she didn’t s...

What's Beneath Too long this linoleum languor.  Aren’t you tired of pretending tile curls  like the brittle crust of a chapped lip? You and I both know  if we could get a grip on the flap  of skin beneath the chin and clear the snag of nose our faces would snap off the scalp like a swimmer’s cap, then once we mopped up the place  we could really see eye to eye. We might find, like the time we moved the washer when it was time to move out  of Liberty St, that beneath you could press through the floor with a finger. You said shit like you meant it; I loved that. It cost us the whole of our security  deposit. Sure, it'll mean more than just the laminate but the quarter-round and base- boards, even the subfloor down to the joists, but we knew with this fixer-upper we were signing away choice.   And then for every sunk savings, every swift-swallowed dream, you hear things you can really plant a back foot on, like people finding original hard-...

Making the Pipe To be hollowed enough  to cradle the flame,  to be a grain  that won’t split  under the steady press of a spoon bit  scooping out  the burled core , to waft into the weft as nothing more than amoretto and a hint of whiskey cavendish

Wake, Sleepers Regarding the leveled charge of being  half-awake, I take what appears the stand and mutter a soft guilty that slips through my hands like something not unlike blood  or butter. To the ensuing one  of being okay with it I smear them  with a scream of innocent, innocent,  innocent till it swells the open  orifice of their ears and their faces  melt as I sit up in bed, drenched  at last in real, salty sweat.

Beneath the Sink Not much room to wiggle  your elbows or get anything  like torque behind the wrench, and did I mention how the rusted nut  of the world is tucked so far back you just have to feel  for it, eyes crawling on the cobwebs you let spread under  the cabinet while your fingers fumble for a catch, that tightening you’ve come to connect  as potential , the grip that keeps you  coming back to spend the long afternoon  of your life chasing the chance that like a breath, like water  from the rock, suddenly it loosens.

The Cardinal Moment  After the storm worms thickened the field and the crows feasted on soft bodies washed up and wriggling, while heaven, refusing  not to see, wept blood. A nd a drop  dripped from the poplar tree   to settle right on the brow of this black  fever. In a breaking   thunderous enough to shake all fear the oily murder lifted and all the darkness winged into air. 

In the town that lost its daughters to a single blast, the boys grow up  with no one to kiss them out of their iron ideas and back  into the velvet touch of the living room couch. Naturally they will  kill each other i n a later act. No one plays with the dolls  and stuffy's and lovey's so the dolls  and stuffy's and lovey's are not played with,  and, seeing this to be so, bank the latent glow behind their painted lids and recede back into plastic, and the trees, seeing this, know  that the animus has left the place  and stop whispering their pine-scented secret to Saturday afternoons and the crow  and the occasional pair of pigtails that used to listen in and giggle at their pluck, now embarking  on their return to inanimate exchange of sunlight, water, and a sugar y ou've read about but can't taste. The roads are repaved remarkably straight,  what with everyone knowing where they’re going  and no one not knowing enough a...

Wardrobe I am a study in false-starts. I have tried and tried more to keep in separate drawers my project pants from more projectable   slacks, but the dividers crumble till it all slides back in the jumble like each fresh attempt to save receipts. I get out my books and teach with paint on my ass, take the bread and wine with caulk smeared down my left leg. When I reach  into my pocket for a pen I find a Philips head and the clink of a few, loose words. Screw it again. I am a walking project.  

The Tinkerer Repents No one, likely, will ever see the fresh coat of white  on the back of the doghouse,   the unpainted part kept hid and slid flush to the house and invisible unless you drop something important back there and slide it out, which no one, likely, will ever do. So I considered,  considering, not wasting the work of another hour on my knees for what’s behind and unseen, but man there's something to it, how deep I sleep when I know   that—whenever it's time to re- arrange the garage—I can.