L.R. Harvey Poetry

EVIDENCE ENOUGH In the drawer off the kitchen island jammed shut with dried pens,  enough loose pennies to buy  another week of neglect, half a deck of cards, and all the stuff that both  zip-ties a life together and makes it    so hard to shuffle through, you’ll find a key. It doesn’t fit the front door  or the screened-in porch, and as far  as you’re aware the neighbor’s is still  mud-caked under the cracked paver in case the pipes freeze when  they’re out of town. Wait now…  Nope, the teeth don’t quite line up  with the one from the old place either, another copper reminder of all the places you don't belong. Still, in this drawer of neither here nor there, at least you can be sure  there’s a door—somewhere—with hinges waiting, straining against the frame.

PAVERS Off the porch is a wilderness  of crabgrass, and if that lip of stone suggests a path  it isn’t much of one. Out  here you’re on your own  when the screen door slams.  But if you have the grit to dig around a bit, coaxing that edge  like a scab, with some sweat and a good weed-whacker  you might yet begin to unearth a trail laid far  before your time by someone who knew just how easily we lose ourselves in this thin-between, how desperately we need a dotted line to draw us both to the road a nd back home.

TIMBER Sure, I now know the mistake,  which is when—between now and then— mistakes tend to be known. When we built the house it didn’t seem  so big, that angle so precarious,  but given that in our current soil condition everything rots at the roots and tumbles in time, I’m not here to argue. I didn’t call you to keep it  from falling flat. We’re past that.  But if you wouldn’t mind—as the one  with the truck, the hard-hat—teaching  a fellow hardhead a thing or two about how to direct the fall to keep it  from crushing the children’s rooms,  Cheers . I’m all chainsaw teeth and ears. 

  DRIVING HOME FROM SCHOOL AFTER BUTCHERING ECCLESIASTES If every time you reach  to drink deeply of cup there is an sudden flash of exactly what you can’t explain  but the pain makes clear  that something has—look  at that!—cut your hand off, at least nothing  is stopping you—like the man in the beat-up Buick  rolling a four-way—from hanging  your stump out the window  all the way home.

HANDBOOK At what point exactly  does a drought become— with the very bloom  it withers—perennial?  The shovel leans against  the white shed, rusting  in the thought of rain,  and off Happy Valley Road a pasture is deemed ripe for harvest and a flock  of yellow Cats led out to graze. When in this development does it become wisdom  to sell your inheritance?  So much is said  about progress, so little  about what to do  with the handful of left-over  seeds beside the trowel   at the bucket's bottom. As with the dusty manuals you found when cleaning out the shed, and most any advice on how to make something of this,               best throw this out. 

Tiling The difference is in how you mix  the thin-set, which you want  anything but thin if you hope  your ceramic to set true, and yes, it’ll be a mess if you do. Nothing new:  you've always had to choose  between leaving here covered  in the stuff or playing it clean as you walk on hollow ground, the sound of your heel-strike echoing the space between  good enough and good.   

THIS WORLD? THAT? Eventually, given the firmament’s  odd proclivity for drifting further   and further apart, having a foot  firm in each is sure to start  stretching taut the tender stuff, till soon enough you must either  pick one to ditch—though  which   is the question that got you here in the first place, spanning  the space— or learn to sit  more or less comfortably in a split,  neither here nor there but loosening your tendon-tight  conviction that it’s imperative to pick.