L.R. Harvey Poetry

AN EARLY LESSON The dark was big and cold,  so my father laid the ground to build  a fire pit, spread gravel down  to carve a space in the yard about  the size of a living room, a life. In older cousins’ coats we’d sit  in plastic chairs, clink pebbles  off the grate while he split logs he picked up from the curb  of a neighbor’s house. We were wealthy in woodsmoke, sweet tooth-squeak of an uncooked marshmallow, talk of church  beneath the temple of the oak tree. He’d get up periodically, knees popping   to preach to us—not saying anything— how it's nothing less than  breath to keep a flame going.

RESURRECTION ALTERNATIVE If I’m wrong, and it’s just dust we’re after, I’d like to request—forgive me:  old habits, like hopes, die hard—to rise a clover on the eastern side  of a low hill of strawberries, not expected to grow anything or feed anyone but simply tasked to tilt towards the light and do my bit to frame the feast, dew-blessing fingers as they peel back a shroud to shout, look at this one! Ripe earth is all I'd hoped of heaven anyway.

DRIVEWAY PRAYER She tends to orient her pig-tails towards the more elusive things: bubbles on an April breeze, leaves scraping down warm cement, the dog bent  low and mischievous, a jelly-sandal in his jaws. It bothers her little how little she has to show for these pursuits, how slow she pivots when changing direction,  how fast her vision veers for chirping birds, airplanes, any suggestion of the word M-A-M-A. Question:  say she were to find it, whatever it is she’s after—what then? Once the dog caught a squirrel, lame in its left leg, and they lay  there looking at each other  in mutual disappointment. If she were to find you, Lord, as something other than the faint gleam  of a bubble barely visible over  the tree-line—that is to say, if she were to grow tired of chasing and grab  you with her tiny hands—pop, please, and sprinkle her face  with blessing, that she might turn her eyes upwards, asking—again—for more.

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.