L.R. Harvey Poetry

  FM RADIO,   CROSS COUNTRY In this elongated interstate  the music cuts in and out  like a madman in a beat- down Buick. Melody-stutter, static-flutter—no road sign, but it's signal enough to indicate  our status as passing through  another of the many, invisible  thresholds we’re bound to cross  before we get where we’re going.  This is the burden of the homeward bound, forever twisting the knob for a bit  of clarity, ears and something  more than ears tuned tight to catch it coming through clear and hold it there—just there—                 long enough that we’re ferried   forward on its frequency     another late-afternoon leg.             

SLEEPING IN The problem with the late start is that it always works so well  the night before. You’ll simply slip  out of bed, quick-rinse your head then step out the door, well-rested and better for it. The problem  with the late start is that the ensuing problems—however consistent—remain the odd, unfortunate one-off: lost key, low on gas, loads of clean clothes  but only dirty ones match. Call us  slow in the uptake, but we’re quick  to forgive ourselves the inconvenience in the name of lingering a little longer.  Perhaps this is the great, cosmic  punchline: yes, we’re still here,  and despite it all and however disheveled, we still might get to where we’re going  with no lasting repercussions but the stress we insist on scrambling to find .

7th PERIOD Safe to assume we’ve probably got it  mostly wrong, or if not quite wrong  then likely a right that’s misinterpreted the question. That being said, students,  the fact remains that at the construction site  behind the classroom there’s a trailer-load of 2-by-10’s used to frame the concrete  foundation that I struggle to believe  they’re throwing away. Perhaps  it would be a more advantageous  use of our day were we to spend what’s left  of class time shouldering lumber across campus to the bed of my truck.  I, for one, plan on spending a few afternoons of my remaining puzzlement to puzzle  together a table where my children can pick up the pondering where I left off. It seems as good  a use of time as any. It's coarse work, but with every pass of the paper you can’t help  but feel that you’re getting somewhere,  like maybe, in the proverbial 8th period,  we’ll get up from our desks and gather roun...

WHAT TO MAKE, HOW MUCH TO MAKE Lest I be misconstrued as a proponent of parking lots, tennis courts, and other asphalt immobilities, I love the inexhaustible possibility of play a pool affords.  How, on any given day, the pool becomes exactly what we need the pool to be:  place to cool toes, deep end  to drown in, sharks become minnows become sharks become minnows.   The pages of the book sit open  on the folding chair, forever flipping in the breeze. Haul in the swim lanes! Fire the lifeguards! Let the cannonballs fly! So yes,  I’m all for the proposed expansion  of the pool, the opening of more  open space for more of us to discover who we are  in the endless variations of light  on its waters. My concern is twofold:  a small, cramped pool for starters,  but also that—in the fever of renovations— we bulldoze the borders entirely  and lose the pool, finding ourselves right  back where we started:  a parking...

SOME A SSEMBLY REQUIRED The hardware given to hold together this project of ours is mis-labeled, small, and hard to hold. The maddening truth  of the matter is that we are both reliant  on the hardware and cursed to wear  these fat, overripe appendages.  Screws slip our pinch again  and again, in and out, disappearing    in the weave of the carpet, the grass,  beneath a couch, the missing piece both right in front of our faces  and impossible to find until we climb  down from our ladders and hit our knees,  feeling around like blind beggars who only discover the point  when it wounds us and spills our blood.

WAKING AT 29 Cannon fire of lamp click.  Toy kicked and battling every wall in the hall.  Who replaced these bare feet with concrete pavers?  Is it too loud a hope to creep quietly  across the living room  and figure some things out  in the light of the front  window before the house wakes? Too late: here come the hungry.  Lay out your queries  and whatever meager quarry you’ve gathered over the years like so many  pieces of peanut-butter bread and a smattering of goldfish.  This one will take a miracle.

LAND LEGS If you find yourself something less  than the paradigm of steadiness you projected, staggering stupidly as you first leave your craft and step ashore,  cut yourself a little slack.  Having acclimated to this our perpetual tempest till the hem and haw felt flat,  of course you’ll stumble  like the proverbial drunken sailor  when you encounter the steady ground of your motherland. In fact, you might even  use your disequilibrium as a metric to sound your surroundings in the future, differentiating what's rooted from the  more familiar, shifting ground of your surety.

APPROACHING THE HEART Difficult to find a table in this crowded coffee shop,  one with a little elbow room  in a back corner where you can  detach yourself for a minute to watch  what’s going on with an eye  clear as a cool glass of water.  This place is the hot spot among varied clientele, and if the baristas  are a bit, well, eccentric ,  and the chatter a tad loud,  it’s an interesting crowd and the place has a pulse to it.  You’re here to discover who you are and what you want, which is a tall task of itself, an even bigger ask given that all the tables  are full and mid-conversation about nothing, save for a single chair  across from a face  that stirs in you a bubbling ache of remembrance,  like seeing a childhood friend for the first time in twenty years or hearing your own voice played back in a recording. He nods, inviting you to join him, and try as you might to look away the invitation stands, stares, lik...

DRAFTING A WILL AT 29, JUST IN CASE To the earth my bones.  Preferably in a big wicker basket,  but if they insist on a box  than a box of untreated wood  so as not to delay the exchange  of goods. Also to the earth  the many poems I reached down with dirt-filled fingernails and lifted from it to call my own. Forgive  this callus act of plagiarism.  To my daughters a deep furrow of skepticism towards anything  with chemicals, gears, or bloodless brains,  the courage—despite lacking the credentials—to open the hood and see what's making that clacking beneath, and a love of the following: baseball,  the apple trees we planted, the many trees we didn't plant, neighbors, all things slow and placed,  all things mysterious as the song quivering in the thin space between guitar strings, and anything else I'm missing which is good and real and too big to list out or tie down with even the entire three feet of unfolded cerebellum, ...

SPARROW Rainfall, faint caw of possible predator, and you did the no-brainer,  making for the cracked window of the nearest shelter. You left them there—your brains—smeared on the glass, your smudged judgement the truest enemy, and your battered body fit snugly in the shallow hollow  of my shovel. If you’re wondering,  I laid you where I myself have been been laid low, again and again  when my sheds prove something less than  satisfactory: at the foot of the tree we abandoned in our panic, there to lie while the roots pry our ribs apart, devouring  our hearts until—in the course of slow and aching time—we rise as sunlight edging the leaves.

BUILDING THE GREENHOUSE               "Adam Zagajewski" quote The neighbor swears on the existence of a foundation, just there, where the old shed stood.  And believe me, I want to believe  the neighbor, and am near- famished for a place  for something green  to grow in this slow-footed,  leap-year February, where just enough light tricks the eager into showing necks before cutting them short, but the ground thaws on it's own time, and the dull flat-head I'm digging with brings me down just enough to scrape against the conclusion that if a corner block  was once poured it now abides deep, very deep.