L.R. Harvey Poetry

COFFEE-HOUSE KENOSIS The sign over the urinal read  please remember to flush yourself in red letters, but I forgot because I was late and in a rush, bustling out  into the crowded coffee shop  to look for someone who never showed up.  I found out later you were there, the whole  time, had even saved a table for me. I scanned the room  a while to the clink of spoons,  then left. The problem was simply that I imagined you differently. 

PLAYING IN TIME'S CREEK Well, you get to attend more  funerals, for one, where you attend more intently to the way light illuminates the rain-stained faces of the saints present. And then it matters more  what rain smells like than where it came from, or who sent it, or why.  This is the night's unbuttoning, a slow slipping off of the backpack weighed down with what they said we needed to know for the test, t-shirt damp from hauling the weight of all that knowing. Philosophers quit studying and test their luck at Candy Land while children croon I told you so from the top of the chocolate waterfall. In time's creek one poet quits turning over days to find the metaphor and says with a shrug, well, it’s almost dinner time and we haven’t net much; let’s love each other. 

  THE MAD MATHEMATICIAN After factoring down the equation  to simplify what presents on  the surface as a complex problem,  we’ll scrape the lowest common  denominator which is oysters ,  class, just oysters, oysters, oysters. Huge oysters too big for human hands:  sky without street lights, a baby’s head emerging in a sliver of crescent moon,  the sudden and wordless yearning to peer behind the dark cloud.  Slick oysters that slip your grip if you squeeze too tight: three deer dew-stepping at dawn, a toddler in her highchair babbling the bright excitement, the musky scent of bacon and morning breath.  Hidden oysters, too, veiled beneath familiar mud, quietly waiting in the sludgy waters of your routine trudge around campus, my walk home, the freedom of a dropped backpack. We're dealing with the boundless here, remember! This means there are infinite center-points, and the answer we're after, then, is everywhere! Oysters, oysters, oyster...

BEHIND THE CURTAIN In the living room two PhD’s  parse out the finer points  of original sin and other perplexities  that have plagued the faithful for millenia.  Here I'd like to pause and point a finger at such low-hanging fruit as the over- educated imbecile, pen a pithy statement about living with mystery or the deaf discerning what rings true. Perhaps I'll even invoke Christ’s invocation  to become such as these little children, who would never be caught smashing the music box to see what makes it sing. 

A LEAK Sometimes the omens are perplexing.  Today the plumber was explaining how most of it's unseen, and this is why he gets most his calls after a bad DIY project "cause they don't know it’s all connected," when three hawks circled overhead,  slowly tightening like a wrench.  The air froze with a screech  like scraped metal, like heaven’s finger- nails on a trade-school chalkboard, and in the driveway something deep in the soul’s bowels burst. Suddenly  I’d have given anything to speak the language that knows how it works. 

KNOW WHAT I'M SAYIN'? but she said what are you getting at so I said  it's fresh, you know, like a de-beanie'd forehead while the ski-lodge croons Lenny Kravitz.  And she said no I mean like  what are you after , and I said  it's something sharp, like mint gum for a mouth-breather, laughter. She went  Luke what are you talking about and I said believe me baby I'm trying my best to come to terms as our daughter strut by, two-year tummy rind-tight  and held out like a melon balanced on the curved tray of her back,  babbling the thing that's escaped me  since the day I tried to find the words.

GUESS WHO? With little flicks they click face-down:  the bald one and the mustached man, the brown- eyed girl in the ermine cap,  an old chap caught with the pipe between his lips, smoke drawn upwards in pencil strokes. Try to guess who’s  next! This year I’ll age into another turn,  watch as the crowd continues to thin around the board's periphery until  the mathematical probability of a child,  a spouse, a sibling, rises considerably,  the cold finger left with only so many  to pick. It’s a game of suspense,  of waiting until you must say yes ,  and then a rush like tin-roof rain as the board flips and everyone stands again.