This is the final installment of our to-date collection of Jack Harvey’s work. It is a fitting sendoff. Take time to read it–it’s more worth it than you may realize.
___
Out of Time by Jack D. Harvey
The old man rose and
wiggled his toes
in the light of the faltering fire;
the season was Lent
the bent trees starting to bud;
the long procession
of providential days,
like pretty children,
drew a bead on his heart.
At the open window
the old man looked
at the season’s last snow,
scrappy birchbark
black-patched,
the spokes of a
wagon wheel
poking out of
a pile of rubbish.
Open fields
ungreen and mute,
their strength to discover
spring’s breath still
puny and remote.
The old man spoke,
muttering to himself;
some holy place,
shriving, I shall go,
like Noah, send from
the lost ship a dove,
over the flood, a raven.
More and more his
lips move;
whispering, his breath floats,
aimless,
his spirit faltering,
becoming less and less
as day ends,
as the sun, bleeding like a lamb,
redeems itself
for the umpteenth time,
setting in the west.
A prisoner of the sunset
the old man peers out at the sky.
Beauty and life and the end of life;
all debts forgiven in this moment,
in the ribbon of red spreading
from the sun’s defection,
in the blood of redemption,
in the coming of the dark.
Nearer my God unto thee
and never so near;
never near enough.
Lonesome and lost
the old man, like
all of us;
his faith gone
like a runaway balloon, or
is God going away?
Already gone for good?
Our good, His goodness,
moon and sun
set in a heaven
that never was;
an illusion, a dream.
We grapple like fools
with a sky
real as the rain
that falls,
forgetting the very rocks
beneath our feet
are shadows
no more, no less
than the face of heaven.
Made and remade,
our God, our goodness,
blaze anew in
a Promethean sky
of blessed stars;
Newton’s, Einstein’s
imperfect space
keeps time and tune
with God’s enterprise,
paradise confined
to the garden of Eden.
On high,
seraphs, saints, sinners,
the fruit of good and evil,
dancing cheek to cheek,
brushed by some unknown purpose.
Yet down below,
simple and solid,
the dark holds,
tightfisted.
Have we mortified our flesh
for the ten commandments?
Tenderly slaughtered
too many innocents
too many times?
Stabbing and saving,
sowing and raping,
our eyes show the compassion
our hands belie.
Jacob and Esau,
Abel and Cain
compelled by breakneck time,
did better than we think
and worse.
Knights-errant all,
long gone on the quest,
God only knows
what guides us
to our best;
God only knows
what glimmering
in the gloaming
leads us
through the forests,
the mountains,
the high plains,
riding, riding, like Parsifal,
like Tristram,
eager hunters
riding to war.
The romance of life,
the vitality, the blessing,
whatever it is,
against the background of violins
speaks violence;
the plucked string
signals the slaughter to come;
the brave and the meek,
the indifferent, the corrupt,
go about their business;
in the loom of catastrophe,
in the belly of leviathan,
don’t know or care
and that is God’s grace.
With no thought for the morrow,
sans passion or sorrow,
those who survive the longest
sit by the fire
and wait for spring
and the least desire,
are subject to love
and love’s reminders
are touched to the quick
by the turns and twists
of unforgotten luck
and disaster…
Short of breath and temper
they offer hunters’ wisdom
in broken weather,
present for inspection
trembling heads,
candid and flimsy
as cherry blossoms.
Holy and intractable time,
short and sharp
as a knife
cuts the thread;
legions of the living
fall and break
like waves on the shore.
The old man rests;
rests and waits
for the last inning,
the last call to arms.
At the ends of
his gnarled feet,
still wiggling,
his toes signal
their steadfast devotion
to movement.
And,
at the window,
final plenipotentiary,
the merry rising sun turns
his thin white hair
to straw-
alchemist’s final gasp!
Discovering gold.
_____
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, N.Y. He was born and worked in upstate New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.
