L.R. Harvey Poetry

In the Tinkerer’s Shed  Most every tool has a home  here, this tin-roofed tangle suspended somewhere between upended and just order enough to suspect  that someone knows what’s what.  Levels hang crooked from a peg- - board; a box of loose wrenches tightens down one corner of a toothless table saw ; leaned on the wall   and looking down from the loft  a constellation of scraps bear weighty thoughts of all they might one day mean.  What’s thicker than dust here  is a sturdy faith in tilted things  and the unshakeable duty of being born with shims on our wrists. What’s missed, like the one nut ne eded to take this rust and rattle and cinch it all right,  is a clear and terminal task.

All There Is Having slipped the loop of all there is  to say, the wild thing we were hoping to noose feels safe enough in the silence  to peer out from the brush pile  behind the house, nose searching for a scent. For years now it has  dispensed the crackers from our traps,  stepped nimbly over trigger plates cranked tight with all we’re taught, mocked each fresh attempt at a flightless  flock regardless how we've fortified  the coop, flinging down-feathers  like breadcrumbs for us to follow over the field, beyond the brambles.   For all we know, it's like as not tunneled beneath the foundation itself, making porous the packed clay of our permanence. We can name it,  but that is not its name. We can call it  our pet, but it will not come  when called. Is this, then, the end of all  our being here, to coexist in glimpses  and supposals, certain only that a hollow  so deep doesn't burrow itself, that to be...

Leaving City Limits On the special occasion that the words fit right, and amber light cloaks the elm the way a wedding dress becomes a kind of second skin; when August thins to September and the dew-point loosens  its corset till it’s possible to believe in breath again, with all the deep that it might  make; when, without a doubt, the words  fit so unbelievably right as to invite more  than our knees to quake, as if time shuffled  its feet and the callused heel of the world  snagged a loose thread in the tapestry  to show eternity’s stitch, a sparrow cloud curving like a comma on the evening’s page, brief  inhalation to prepare for what comes next—  it’s less the bump of pulling in, quiet  click of arrival as the motor stills,  and more the soft tread of footsteps   on a road again, that two-way blessing   of a horizon with a suggestive curve  we can make towards but isn’t yet         ...

A Question of Medians They cut 27 through the frayed fringe of the battlefield and left behind a vine  of withered Georgia towns  dangling like drought peaches  from an asphalt stem: Rossville,  Chickamauga, Rock Spring, Lafayette. The county mows the median  once, at most, a month; the municipalities  keep theirs tight and low. You might,  of a free afternoon, drive through  without a map, and—using the length of wheatgrass  as a reference—know the thresholds of your goings, the lines clipping away  in the rearview like a poem or a named knowing , all that unincorporated between left to grow, to grow,   t o keep growing.

Dixie Plate  The Tibetan Buddhist monk bows  his weight against the levers of a yellow  Cub Cadet outside the temple plopped off Highway 27, that asphalt bayonet  piercing through the Chickamauga Battlefield  and a potluck of Baptist, tinfoil towns.  Fall, and late September sun glints off the sweat of his bronzed head as the draped sleeves of his blood-red robes  scoop the breeze that swirls beneath  his twelve foot golden god  staring down the ribboned flag of the neighbor's Rebel one. The air is orange with incense of fresh-cut grass, low  om of motor, mower circling  like a mantra. There is a pattern t o it all, but the lines are indiscernible from here.  And are we surprised if—given  this abundance, and just one trip  through the line—the flavors are bound to rise and spill the binds sectioning our disposable plate, edges casseroling into one, indefinable Yes , home-baked? 

The Tract Nothing so expansive as to know  the heavy head of fields on which I stamped my name but cannot make the time to mow. Nothing so vast as to yield  each harvest a bumper crop  of envelopes offering to shave a corner off for cash, to seed into the under- growth of all my goings questions of inheritance. Neither so confined where from the center point of porch  I can trace the lines with the compass of my eye, a plot so manageable  as to slip into believing the world  spins smooth as a globe and not  the finger-spun acorn jumping  across the ridges of a picnic table. Space to lament how little gas  in this mower, how many gaps in this attempt at a fence, boundaries  enough to know the roots of what's mine and share the branches with the neighbor, the sky. Tent, apartment, or ranch,  it's a roughly three-acre life I'm after.