L.R. Harvey Poetry

Just Visiting At this shore the pelicans know  better than to bat against the billow,  their stillness less despair than consent to be carried  there at odd angles like tired toddlers or a flock of bald tires scudding silent over the sea's black ice. Is not our slippery way  with words, this endless appetite for local fare or a roadside map enough to make clear we’re not from around here?    Just look at how unmoored in a head- wind, how hard we insist to flap to ensure we're going nowhere further than the nowhere we set out for.

A Very Real Intelligence No one knows which ship stowed the hammerhead worm in its hold,  but no one either need be told  there’s been a certain, sinister shift in the soil, a culprit difficult to detect as the stick sprawled across the trail that suddenly proves less twig  than tail. On the receiving end  of allegations of hollow stem  and root rot, the hammerhead chooses not to comment  on the wreck, keeping hypothetical hands clean as it feeds instead  on the ones in the thick of working unseen to keep the garden fed. “What’s all the fuss about?”  it choruses from both sides of both mouths, and in the heat of the day we find ourselves with half a mind to agree it couldn’t hurt to lean the shovel  against the shed, slip off our gum boots and massage our bruised heals.  I mean for real, did we think we'd crush its head?

Footnote The prophets say and the seers see, but then there are those who best know their knowing  as the glob stuck deep in the chest  or the kernel wedged back a ways between the wisdom  teeth, who cannot hack it up or choke it down but must live out the slow wheeze of their days  with the incessant scratch of the asterisk swallowed in their hunger for an explanation.

  FESCUE Grass seed has gone up  by the bag. Not that it hasn’t always  asked at least a long afternoon  of your life loosening that old patch you once thought thick enough, but now you’ll need a lusher wad of green as well. Hell, everything costs more  of you the longer you hang around  here, but compared to what it will run to uproot it all and take off for the lawn you’ve long  been hearing about over there, even a truckload  of the staying stuff is still practically free.  

The Hike What is the operative word  for what occurs when the stick  across the trail proves less twig than tail? There’s one too, I’m sure,  for how it feels to look back at the inches between where your footfall fell and Hell, but it’s shrouded in leaf litter.  They slither off, the ones we're after, before we can identify  the exact tilt of their heads or the pattern  etched on their backs, leaving us  with nothing more than the gift  of engorged veins and a whittled eye  as we pick our way down the path  again, surrounded, surely, and alive.

LANDING First the jolt of touching down,  then the slow peeling of the mask  to squint around at the rest of us  squinting around to discover that— despite what the itinerary claims— there is just here with bangs, the same state we know too well to name or clarify why we can't get out the door without bringing it with us in our carry-ons, like that old autobiography we can’t seem to close no matter how much we stare out the open window.

BECOMING There really is so much you can do  with a high school diploma: make  a ramp for your matchbox cars, or get some brackets and hang it  in the kitchen as a shelf for jars of dry rice. It might make a nice  visor when the sun is out,  or propped up become a camp shelter  for GI Joe to climb under when it rains. What it won’t make  is a home for someone of your  stature, or—try as you might to coax  it in the air—a magic carpet  to carry you there. No, it’s still this  body you’ll be camping in, this soul  you’ll be dragging back and forth  across the commencement stage of your life until you finally graduate into the understanding that alma mater  means bounteous mother , womb in whom we’re never not being born.