L.R. Harvey Poetry

The Wait The king’s been gone a time.  Of that there is no doubt.   Once again the pigs are out.  Once again we’ve killed the pigs  or slipped into their skin, plucked Laerte’s fruit  and called it anything but sin.  If we cram the apple in our mouths  will it keep the truth  from spilling out?     The king’s been gone a time.  The whisper’s that he’s dead.  But Eumaeus, Halitherses,  Eurycleia. There are a few, still,  doing what they always did.

The Great Divide There is a chair and a lamp  at the far end of the room.  Here   is the landing of the basement stairs. Under the overheads I stare, take stock of what’s   between—suitcase, yoga mat,  green dumbbells, 25's—then h it  the switch. Isn't this the way of it? With what our eyes can bear to carry of the old light we go feeling towards the new.  

Essay Model            — Unit 1: "Allegory of the Cave," The Truman Show , various selected texts. The prompt is something like “what’s really real?” Beneath and behind the shadows and actors, chains  and sirens and a guy going to work  again the way he always does,  what’s that light round the rim of things, glimmering like broken glass?    The challenge is to synthesize,  to take a jostling mass   of texts and see that “yes,  they don’t all look the same,  but here’s this one, central claim.”   They always turn it in round 9/11, a day that means to them the weather’s beginning to turn and maybe they’ll wear their hoodie to the game.  I was only seven, my mom, as she'd come to say, "reading history to you as history was made," and today we aren’t anywhere near  New York and gone by 25 years,  but phone records model  how to answer the prompt  directly, ...

Birthday Poem The real hammer and the real wrench to build with dad are still in the canvas bag, realisitcally a few years out. But the real tape  fits neatly in her hand, five years old  today, and the way it rolls out and snaps back is the real gift, with the princess watch that really works. Sixty Seventeen . Forty  Twelve. Eighteen Nine . From her room she calls the span of things, or maybe time,  both of which are very very real  but also small  and easily misplaced, like the real, heart-shaped  locket, which always, we tell her,  at the end of the day slips off  and goes back in the music box.  

Carry the Bow Against convention the groom  entrusted him the real thing—Eumaeus,  a boy in a Tennessee church,  in his pocket both the rings.  He spent all afternoon thumbing  the promise, that smooth curve  final and firm as his name,  his own name , printed in  the program, but all the same  he thought it would never come.   Then suddenly it was time.  The doors swung wide. From both sides suitors leered, smiling sweetly  as they willed him to trip  and toss the band so their fingers  could go plunging in.  He shot straight ahead, remembered what he’d been told.  He couldn’t see the face but knew  it was him, backlit gold.

Re-wiring A short somewhere, and sparks:  Dead ladybug wedged  in wicker, spray-painted green— Mower’s tight turn  round the elderberry  bush, leaves dewing clean   the tires—fat fly circling  the teacher’s baldspot  the way I’ve hovered round  God’s helipad, hoping  to touch down. This world,  these flashes: what are we fixing to let it make of us? 

U6 Late August. Everyone’s shirts were soaked. By rights  the parents had worked  enough to earn more than a lawn chair. A storm  building, 14 miles east  per Layla’s dad. Elijah’s wasn’t  there. Most of them  still stopped the ball  with their hands when it got rolling too fast. Sometimes,  mid-practice, I forget  just what it is we’re drilling for.  We gathered beneath the gray,  stacked sticky hands and waited for Elijah, who put the burned skin of his re-membered one right on top. We thundered.

French Drain Quote How the house is built  you can't hill soil up  the siding, level out  the grade. A little self- forgiveness: You weren't there when the land was made. Downspouts help but won’t address how Georgia clay holds rain like a thick, wet resentment, swelling to buckle  the basement’s knees. No one’s saying it’s free,  but life at such a degree  means shaping oneself  a vein through the heart of the yard, pumping its share of the downpour towards  more fruitful pursuits  on the other side: Bee Balm  and Buttonbush, the comeback miracle of mushroom.

Where He’s From   Even then it mattered much  to him, how he was born  in South Carolina, raised in North. No one asked, or cared, but he  split hairs on his right  to the Palmetto sticker stuck  on his high school truck, felt his edges peel up round  Tar Heel games and low-country broils both. How could he have known  it was the tension to which his life  would persistently adhere? Hell, with even heaven and earth, wherever his tires touch  and just past the reach  of his high beams, his soul  is humming in the inter-state,  both there and here.

Drywall Guy One day the pipe split like a slit vein   and the basement bathroom rained.   One day a jab saw and a coupling  made it whole again.  One day Brooke  left blank on her desk the Physics test, calculated with what force oak receives Honda Accord.     One day, then many many more, the hole was left raw-edged and open, a smashed window to the living  room floor.  Brooke’s dad lit a cigarette, said he believed a bit of mud and y ou’d reckon   never was a hole before. Said he wouldn't charge me  an arm and a leg. Said one day he’ll get much more.

Trade School Because I received my Masters in Divinity from a goldfinch bending down  to the dirt a cornstalk  like a long green finger  scratching the world’s furrowed brow. With what the maggot’s left  of his eyes the barn owl  at the roadside agreed to attend  my dissertation. I defended  how, in Chickamauga now,  the battlefield is covered  in aster, ten thousand for every fallen seed, how four doe graze  the abandoned church  whose doors will not stay closed.  At some point down the hill  my diploma flew off  the back of the bike on a wind that smelled of hay row, rain, the sweat of the big man smiling in pain as he jogged past. So you’ll either need to trust  me on this or go digging  yourself, deep into the archives.

Back to School At what level do you learn to say  two sisters, four and two,  sweat-sheened and collapsed to watch clouds on the trampoline  under the riotous pink  of a crepe myrtle?  School goes back in weeks and they'll look at me for answers, though I've told them knowing things doesn't pay well as a career, the landscape too shifting for job security. If I'm absent at the bell you'll find me here, on the porch and tending whatever thunderhead this is simmering just below the breast bone before it explodes  into a dinosaur, a ship, a joy  so like grief you could see it either way and still not quite trace out the edges  come time to point it out.

For Sale: Raised Beds For those who need a border to know  where to dump their bag of dirt and the weight of this urge  to give new life a go. For those  who itch to see earth elevated  but don’t know what to do  with seven cedar planks, forty-two  star-bit screws. With a bit  of maneuvering, the chance of a garden    fits in the back of most vehicles  cleaned out, seats down, but margins are thin. Who of us can balance  the book of our lumbering,  say for certain all we’ve spent  or what square feet of fresh start we’ve helped a stranger load?  How suddenly the yellow tape comes  whirring back, snapped shut  and pocketed before we can  mark the lasting measures.

The Tinkerer Nearly Punches Through He can’t manufacture it,  but sometimes when the mower’s  up on blocks and the bearings hammer out  whole, and black cherry pipe smoke  slips into brake grease like sweat-slicked lovers, and bees d rone drowsy round the uncut clover praying   the part doesn’t fit, and not a monarch but one of those little black ones  touches down on the ratchet set   as the neighbor looses rounds  in the woods behind the house,  he can't mix words to cement it but senses there's a knowing under- girding what he knows, a hand holding the hand holding the wrench, or a stillness beneath the stillness like the baseline hum of box-fan clicking suddenly off.

The Tinkerer Puts His Tools Away Because nothing is ever really  fixed, and the firm grape slips around the porcelain plate  no matter how he sharpens  the fork, so he turns now to the grueling work     of floating in the flux, a kid on the swings content to press bare feet  again and again into the wet cement  of sky. The secret kids keep is that you can walk before it sets,   that you needn't pick between being certain as a beetle's grip on the world's finger and as easily flicked off, that—turns out—that drawer of dirt-stained instruction manuals makes great paper planes if you learn to let them go just right.