L.R. Harvey Poetry

PROPERTY LINES Time was two bushes could align  to signify nothing other than themselves. It’s effort to see with uninvested eyes,  the field undivided and belonging to no one but itself and the few trees of the field.        Still, my daughter just ran through one  with her kite and didn’t even trip.  Last night, the deer worked down  the blackberry hedge and didn’t balk  when the clusters became the neighbor’s.  Even twenty minutes down the road  the geese arrow unphased ahead as they North across the Tennessee- Georgia border. Where else has familiarity  lined our lives into forgetting  that all of it’s ours or none of it is,  and further, that we can stake our claim  on both if there are no sides for choosing?

Finches, GA 27 Even now, even here, chirrups  poke peepholes through the thick swath   of siren that wraps the raw wound of the world. Starlight arrives at the scene only in pin-pricks, eternity’s IV drip, drip, dripping—still a ripping thirst, but enough to croak out the word Al ive till the surgeon  arrives. It’s here, when our vehicles  have ground to a halt or wrapped  themselves like a snap bracelet around a telephone pole, that from the shattered window of all we know unspools a treble staff on which  the notes arrange  themselves, unstanchable melody seeping  through the white  noise of interstate that's shaping up  to be our place of residence a while yet.

DIRECTIONS “This way to the museyroom!” — Finnegan’s Wake Past the suburban safe-holds where anything out of standard roof-line will be granted the space to speak to the committee at the HOA assembly, where it will be duly welcomed to the neighborhood given a few concessions— Past the school building  with its troop of broken-backed children shouldering the weight of their knowing from room  to room, their heads growing steadily heavier until they drop on a desk and the oil of industry leeches out— Past most of the churches, even,  content to gather in their  ramshackle shelters raised on the ruins of a temple, so long as there’s the illusion  of walls and a safe place to worship the wilderness. This way to the museyroom,  belovéd, and watch your head as you enter through  the little, upside-down door,  though you’re guaranteed to knock it just before you disappear through the floorless floor.   

WAITING FOR EDEN         — for Eden, who took her time getting here And still the weight grows as we wait, limping past the due date while we lament  the undefined distance dividing here from healing,   trudging about like expectant mothers dreaming of release.  And still the ache remains faceless if inarguably there, alive,  and impossible to ignore, and if this is love we’re laboring towards then dare we admit our growing occasions of envy towards  those who carry a little less? What evidence more  that we are famished  for a nail driven into our flesh deep enough to take away the pain,  a final push, a name,  and then the long road back to our old selves again?

GETTING IN SHAPE “ Phall if you will, rise you must” — Finnegan’s Wake A chilly evening when I finally opened the door, laced up, and set out, overconfident and at an unsustainable clip. Confession came in gasps of thin air, as did the answer: heaven unbuttoning in a deep-V,  and a multitude of the feathered  host flapping overhead—40-odd at least—giving shape  to this wintering hope that there’s still a horizon worth making towards, even for those of us  starting late as February and staggering beneath the weight of our cross- training, sucking wind after only  the first, uphill mile.

DREAM-SEQUENCE It’s the moment right before you slip  to sleep, or on the other end  as you first peer over the edge  of waking, the bulk of you still dangling  over the precipice, that the dream  remains—or nearly—logical,   connective threads still visible and glistening with dew, and for a few minutes  the surreal making a kind of sense,  questions of how or why unnecessary to parcel out the inner-workings of a world where two plus two could equal  anything from four to your mother, dead for years now,  tightening the handle-bar brackets on her Schwinn and telling you she's ready for the ride. What is faith if not this thin space between worlds elongated into a life, where even a god could cry himself to sleep at night and men be nursed into gods without needing to justify themselves.

ANOTHER APPROACH Not just to play  contrarian or be un- necessarily obscure,                 but if right-side- up is nothing more                 than upside- down turned upside-                down, and seeing as the straight                and narrow is pitching like a ship’s deck,  the white line  a serpent writhing  in the officer’s  light, might not  an equally tenable  solution turn out  to be another spin instead of sobering up and finding your land legs again?