L.R. Harvey Poetry

The Tinkerer Nearly Punches Through He can’t manufacture it,  but sometimes when the mower’s  up on blocks and the bearings hammer out  whole, and black cherry pipe smoke  slips into brake grease like sweat-slicked lovers, and bees d rone drowsy round the uncut clover praying   the part doesn’t fit, and not a monarch but one of those little black ones  touches down on the ratchet set   as the neighbor looses rounds  in the woods behind the house,  he can't mix words to cement it but senses there's a knowing under- girding what he knows, a hand holding the hand holding the wrench, or a stillness beneath the stillness like the baseline hum of box-fan clicking suddenly off.

The Tinkerer Puts His Tools Away Because nothing is ever really  fixed, and the firm grape slips around the porcelain plate  no matter how he sharpens  the fork, so he turns now to the grueling work     of floating in the flux, a kid on the swings content to press bare feet  again and again into the wet cement  of sky. The secret kids keep is that you can walk before it sets,   that you needn't pick between being certain as a beetle's grip on the world's finger and as easily flicked off, that—turns out—that drawer of dirt-stained instruction manuals makes great paper planes if you learn to let them go just right.

  The Tinkerer: Reckoning Like that pile of scrap, so many things he wants to become, but never graduated from being the utility guy he was in college ball, a cleat firm at each  position, love refusing to let him become an expert. When he finds himself  in the splits he tries to trust the ache is not a tear but a long-coming loosening like a too-tight tendon. In the mirror he can still see himself there,  spitting seeds and stretching  down the left-field line, wondering  who he’s going to be  today and exercising his trust there’s still  a solid spot for such fluidity  in the line-up card tacked over the bat-rack.

Invisible Fence The weatherman did not account  for how cicada chirrups  raise the forecast of extreme heat another ten degrees, and I did not account  for how long Georgia clay retains the rain  when I told Wayne at Dependo Rent-All we needed the Ditch Witch  just four hours. Every twenty feet  or so we stopped and Dad  used the broken handle of a hoe to clear  the blades of clay. We’d blink  the sting of salt away and eye what’s left  of the acreage, then trade  and drag another stretch. It was a day,  and looking back a good one, accounting  for how the smallest chink in the circuit  shuts the whole thing down and we lose what we always thought  would be there, invisible  as a bluetick reclining on the welcome mat.

After the Screened-in Porch     "when a man goes out to fight for the truth he should never wear his best pants."  What he knows now about tiling  is that sparks flying from the whir of a wet saw means it's plumb out of water, if you happen to be a fan of firm ground mix the thin-set anything but thin, and best do it with a little brother while the two of you float  the tenor to “A King is Coming to Town,” sure it sets right before Sunday’s Christmas  choir. What he knows now about raising daughters, how to bear   with a friend the unbearable weight of cradled air, how  to square the bend of his thoughts  before they’re too stiff  to shift? Again, just odds and chipped ends, so he has no plans of getting out of here anything less than covered in the stuff.

Repair is the Endless Possibility He double-checked the main was off but forgot how snakes will thrash  for minutes after shoveling off  their heads, how docs insist to remind you the strep will slither back if you hack short the antibiotic. So when he spent his Sabbath in the nook beneath the cupboard,  he swapped the dishwasher’s pump  just fine, but there was still water  enough in the line between  the main and the sink to flood  the kitchen while he labored  at the source. He emerged as one rejoicing not to scrub the dishes anymore,  his towel now free to tackle the floor.

The Tinkerer Works on Himself No taste for cucumber, squash,  but he sows a handful each March  to see if he can train himself  up a trellis, as if maybe  it’s as simple as you just start  doing the type of things  the person you want to be  does. Like maybe smiling  is the best way to become  one of those approachable people,  or not talking so much a sure step toward the contemplative  type. But then, come every July,  he remembers he forgot again to label the seeds of the self he is and the one he'd like to be, finds a thatch of vine so thick he can’t track back   which is which.