4 Poems by Luke Harvey

Even without the unblinking stare
tailing you since you can recall,

what with all the what's-one-mores
and corner stores, keeping it

between the lines is hard enough.
But enough. He taps on your window.

All stills. You cut the transmission.
He calmly demands total submission

on the shoulder, extracting you
from the driver’s seat on the firm grip

of a question. There’s no question
of rescue. It’s just him and you

now, face to face. He blinds you
with his light and calls you by name

across the narrow and straight.
You feel like you’re walking on water.

You spill everything. Making it home
will take another miracle, even

a final confiscation of the keys.
No, sir, you're not fine. Follow me.

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

with increasing contentment
in a split, neither here nor there

as you loosen your tendon-tight 
conviction that it’s imperative to pick.

Bordering absurd, just how many 
miles the bluebird will traverse, back

and forth with a pine needle or a rogue 
piece of lace, another cast-off thing

refusing quite to equate, not unlike 
my dad's repeated returns to Home

Depot to buy a miter saw and a project 
plank, a pint of blue paint, gallons

of gas exhausted to spend what’s left 
of a Thursday afternoon building

with his granddaughter an eight-inch house 
stuck on a copper pole with a hole.

Despite our best attempts to balance 
accounts, what do we make

of the fact that quite none of it seems 
to add up, the remainder hanging

around like loose pennies in a pocket?
How lucky, one day, we will know ourselves

to be, to have jingled a while
in a world of such costly inefficiencies.

We didn’t plant it, but ours was the roof
it loomed over, so aggressively green

and always branching in directions
we didn't plan. We had thought ourselves fit

to take up the sheers and shape it
to the space, but how quickly it got out

of hand, knuckling up against the house
and vining fingers over the fence

to involve the neighbors. Even
after we cut it down it wouldn’t

let us rest, its thick stretch of torso
rerouting the road till we took

a chainsaw to its trunk, an axe to the rounds,
then burned till nothing was left

untouched by the ash. Even now,
in skins we washed till they shrunk

too tight for us, the occasional whiff
of smoke sets our own roots aching.