L.R. Harvey Poetry

CLOSER And just when you think you might have drawn the card that lets you   skip the dark square and stay in the game till they close the box,  it’s suddenly the friend  of a friend or the freshman  when you were a senior, an old  teammate’s little sister,  and you feel the stray dog  whose attacks the next town over  you've read about over coffee before now snuffling at the crack   under your door or around your feet beneath the table, and while he hasn’t yet bitten your children you see  more clearly now how other people’s children  are your children to other people, how all that "oneness" shit might have some kernels of more than undigested corn in it.

PERENNIAL And then, as if it knew that something  in you had allowed itself to consider how maybe—after a harvest like that— this is what arrival tastes like, the woods behind the house begin to thin, sheering their adolescent locks t o reveal the bare strip of bypass which has always been  there but was veiled enough  to look over when you moved in, and you must now look once again at your failure to be anything more than a potted plant on the back of a nursery flatbed roaring for soil somewhere far from this perennial dance of seed, chance, and wilt.

PACKAGING I suppose, as those who care about  what goes on inside, it’s not unwise  to invest in a good, sturdy box. The interior  takes its fair share of knocks  in transport, and as the interior  spends fromative time in transport,  those invested in the well-being  of things unseen should be the first to see the value in seeing the hidden  safely through from A to B.  In short, there may be nothing wrong  with a good, sturdy box, so long as we’ve a sharp pair of snips and the sheer grit to break down the provisional  once the tape is ripped and the veiled  revealed. Such packagings have  the tendency to put down roots  of their own on the floor of the living  room and begin their second lives  as stumbling stones once we’ve said our goodbyes and make, once more, for the door.

HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD Among the many dialects I’ve yet  to acquire is that of old men by the mailbox  while the county lays a sewer line.  Studies have shown that if you take  a data set of rats and raise them  in isolated chambers before  caging them together, they will  develop a means of communication  all their own. Of course, who knows  who funds these studies or runs the lab, which is why the old men gather around the mailbox, knowing that in a world this beyond our control  maybe the bravest thing we can do  is walk down the driveway and talk  about it, right under the nose  of the developers and in a language  they forced on us and could never understand.

HOW IT ALL WORKS It was not quite a tray of brownies or a casserole, but what it was  was layered and laid out in front of me like cornbread, or a sheet cake.  And then, as if it had been over- baked, the base began to break  apart, jagged edges drifting apart    and busting through the boundary of the pan like Pangea. I’m not asking you to understand,  but I knew in the way a dreamer knows  that what was here before me  was indivisible: bedrock covered by the Bermuda, hardwood beneath the vinyl floor, and more—when  I picked it up to find it edible— that the dish was dense, rich,  and a remarkably simple recipe  with just a few key ingredients  for which I'd spend the rest of my life mapping the waking words.

HOSPICE No one is arguing the diagnosis  of Sick . The symptoms have grown  impossible to ignore. The baby finds  a piece of candy on the floor and eats the engorged tick that dropped from the dog. At some point the fog lifts on the valley of the doe’s eye  hollowed out by soldier fly, a tangle  of intestines blocking the shoulder  where we would go to change a tire  if we weren’t also out of gas.  There is silence in the waiting room  when the doctor asks if anyone wants to put up a fight that the world is right.  We passed that exit miles back and threw our trash out the window. The talk now is about  how to ease the panting chest, how best to hold the bony hand and make something worthwhile of this waning light.

A-to-B Good news is that every vehicle  comes with an old one  crumpled in the glove box, but there's no red star to make clear You A re Here. What it offers is a survey of the scene, complete with county lines, freeways, and other scars that remain  more or less unchanging with time.  The gnarled tree , the old mill, the places  that place us in-between are ours to find. W e might even drop a tentative pin, and then another, and given what may be a lifetime pulled over on the side of the road, receive from the cup- holder the pen and begin the slow work  of mapping the winding route between the two