L.R. Harvey Poetry

COMING, COMING What you’re after is just around the corner of wherever you’ve arrived. Or, say instead that what you’re hungry for— the shadowy craving in the famished hours of morning—is not in the refrigerator or the pantry, unless it’s the refrigerator you imagine in the house around the corner. You might say that what you really desire    is not the touch of the stranger you’re lusting after on a train, but the tendrils of their odor  as they brush past, smile, then disappear forever around the bend. You know this, of course,  you who have found again and again the barbecue joint on the other end  of town to be an insufficient antidote to quell the inner gnawing roused by the evening smell of wood smoke as the air crisps and the light begins to balk,  who can’t understand but can’t deny why something in you wants to take a bite of the baby  in your arms because you just can’t hold it close enough. You've seen the tree in the distance and cried...

A REAL CONCERN But not so much that famous death  as advertised: loss of breath,  heart putters like a mower  out of fuel, drool. Sure,  I’m not looking forward to it, anymore than—per chronological nature—the next guy. What keeps me up is rather exactly what it means to— as the Rabbi paints it—die into a slow awakening, and more so, how we know.  Sometimes I wake up in no hurry, take a long shower, scramble a few eggs for breakfast, shuffle back into the room to brush my teeth,  only to discover myself  still under the covers cause this was just the outer dream. It happens in what the doctors call deep  REM, when I'm all the more asleep for thinking I'm awake.  You see the problem here, I trust. Take it with a grain of salt,  then, and preserve me your judgment when I suggest I’m coming to  the gradual realization that the dead are those who know there’s always more dying to do.

  HOW TO RETURN FROM THE KNOWING-PLACE — circa 3:45pm Begin by acknowledging how heavy  the knowing you’ve been tasked to tote.  Note how taught this tendency  to color-code, to place in the approximate  folder, how quick you’re found  to spiral-bound, staple, three-ring- bind the unaccounted-for you find  and cram them in your bag.  Pay attention to the tension  in your spine and other central parts of you, grown rigid as a hardback.  Now here comes the hard part:  Shrug your shoulders, the way  you used to when you didn’t know the answer, had nothing to say. Feel the air-conditioning kissing your damp t-shirt as your backpack slumps to the floor, more than muscles loosening as you step inside and drop it on the mat. You know the rules: Slip off your shoes. This  is what you’ve been waiting for.  All that knowing  won’t help you here.  Welcome home.

TELEPHONE WIRES Thank you, birds, for your persistent  insistence that we recall and not  give up recalling how heavy we are,  how muted our tones, the density of our  minds matched just by our bones.  Thank you for picking up the slack in  our due regard to trees, lending your inner ear to their circling koans.   But thank you most, perhaps,  for bestowing your tender chastisement over our coiled, steel-bound belief that we might communicate meaning- fully—across time-zones even, if the signal’s strong— without resort to song.  

CLASSIFICATION Well it’s hard to believe in humanity— like really defend our sanity—  when some schmuck with gall  and a degree once and for all  classifies Dandelion as a weed.  That next summer everyone agreed their yellow did seem a bit invasive,  that come to think of it it was a mite presumptuous to simply show up uninvited like that, to go  on popping in every year like everyone enjoys that sort of thing, like everyone is fine and dandy with a grace they didn’t plant themselves, couldn’t buy.  So forgive me for my disbelief in us and our penchant for spray bottles,  weed whackers, and other illusions of control. It's not that I question the existence of flowers, weeds, and everything between—all I’m asking is  that you leave me out when we begin nitpicking who gets in the garden.

WISH LIST What I want is the true stuff  undistilled as the corn  in my shit, the kind  I can’t recall consuming but find there nonetheless, riddled in the mess. What I want is a hardback answer to prayer—  a thick one with a spine  on it—the kind you know is there because of its heft in your hands. Really what I want  is what's left, the kernel at the bottom  of the bag, the unpuffed one   that wedges in your teeth or sticks in  the soft skin of your throat, all the better if it sticks in a fold of your throat so every word is haunted by the wound.

ACCIDENTAL PRAYER  “Come, Victor, with feelings of peace and gentleness that will heal, instead of festering, the wounds of our  minds. ” — Alphonse Frankenstein to his son, Victor  Yes—Come, Victor, recipient even of petitions misaddressed to lesser makers, hasten  home to us. Exhume our bloated bodies   from the filth in which we fester. Dust  off our femurs and phalanges, our metatarsals then our metanarratives of how it all fits  together. Supposedly you’ve come across the secret to revive again the lifeless  matter. What’s the matter? Our will is fractured in this laboratory light. Set it right.