Four Poems by Jack D. Harvey

 

Heimkehr, October 1981

 

The sweetness in sap

is plenty hot,

it rises slow as steam.

I feel the breath

of my disease

rise

in the same slow way.

I owe a cock (my own?)

to Aesculapius

yet I am not healed.

 

Mortal coils

are shuffled off

the poets say

with ease or not;

hot or cold

we take our leave

for other worlds

or ways.

 

Blueprints from the

draftsman’s

hallowed hand

bring on the fearful night

or brilliant light of morn,

bring on phantasms, mist

or music of the spheres.

We take our time

from His or Hitler’s

comings and goings;

we take our time from

eternity, if you please:

 

iceberg enough

its cold creation

melts

drop by drop

to the world beneath.

 

Sure of seconds, the atomic clock’s

as out of whack

as Big Ben,

and we stump on, regardless.

We coarse souls.

 

Ancient ships will

wait in the roads,

taking their time.

Biding a wee bit,

babies will die.

 

I agree that

every life brings

down the rain,

the rain in buckets

the small rain

the cold rain.

The rain on trees

is warm;

on our sleeping bodies

you and me

I agree

the rain is cold

and comfortless

and so will be.

 

Together or apart

I agree

the time is short

and not always sweet.

 

And so will be.

 

And yet the clay, our clay

alive long since,

changed by the sun

and dried and caked;

 

two brittle mortal pots

we sit apart,

afraid our love

of being close

 

will break us both.

 

 

Deborah

 

You are old now, Deborah,

the sun that would not set,

the small rare face

that brought forth

many a suitor's tear

is gone

 

a dream.

 

You stir the pulse

no longer in the long

nights of sleep;

you wake the heart's

surge no more.

 

I see you now,

elegant and old,

queen of autumn,

a queen bereft,

your kingdom abandoned,

a forgotten name, a dead leaf.

 

Powerless and desolate,

retiring, withdrawing, retreating,

queen of a season only,

tiny

among the massive shadows

of the west

like a rose at evening

 

you shut.  

 

    

Aulis

 

King Agamemnon,

most astute of duellists,

his hand on false science

and beauty,

prepares to preside over

his fierce and lawless tribe;

bamboozling fancy effects

out of the evening sun

by happy chance

of light and shade.

 

A snow-white maid.

Gods approve:

the flimsy robe

doesn't conceal

naked

pulchritudinous

boobs.

 

Avast! The sacrificial axe,

captivating unwieldy kinsmen

and black and cherry-cheeked allies

descends through eons,

fit to kill,

like the lightning of fantasy.

 

“Little that is lovely is safe,“

“Cave canem,"

the more educated lions in the

crowd sentimentalize

after the bloody act,

and the wind,

cathartic and unwearied,

the prize,

blows painfully hot.

 

The coast is clear.

 

Atlantic City

 

Hello Miss Bright as a dime,

dressed to kill and

sheathed hard in the blazing light

of this New Jersey casino.

 

Long ago, on the other

side of the world,

my name was legion

in the Navy's Seventh Fleet;

sailors of the South China Sea

we roistered port to port,

waterfront bar to bar,

shot to shot hitting the bottle,

whore to whore

spending our money

in the moment and then

dead broke and lamenting,

off to hell in a handbasket.

 

And now I'm here

and you ask me

in that skin-tight dress,

armour for the fight

and bait for the prey,

how did I get here?

How the hell did you?

From the cornfields of Iowa

how are you making out

in this last of the Mohicans casino?

A living doll, if a doll could live,

painted eyes and rouged cheeks,

dangerous and treacherous

as Judas or Jezebel.

 

A cargo of lure

for lustful men

cast and caught

in the glaring casino light;

no time but the present

and no clocks to tell otherwise;

in an eternal now you stand waiting

for the right pick, the easy mark

with a fat wallet.

 

No thought for the coming winter,

when you strip down for action

in some sordid hotel room,

when your fulsome breasts,

far from the enchanted cups

of maiden's form

no more hold their weight aloft

and the body's flesh sags off

to leeward, like a ship

labouring in a storm,

lashed by the wind and seas.

 

Now you float calmly

in Coleridge's dome,

queen to be seized,

but the time will come

when you are over and done;

some Oxford don,

speaking on your behalf,

recalls Villon's Belle Heaulmière,

beautiful armouress,

looking down at the wreck

under her dress and remembering,

wondering was it so satisfying

when loverboy mounted in stiff haste,

having paid the freight for his passage?

 

The time will come,

it will come,

when that curly crop of yours

carpeting paradise

will thicken and grey

and your youth

will be flung from the rock

like everything else.

 

Time, my sweet, corrupts,

creeps on apace,

measuring the motions

of the distant stars

and our petty motions

here below, in the process

breaking down all,

just by its baleful touch.

 

At the end of the final day

there is no grace in our going,

only a falling away

from this precious unkempt ball

circling the sun;

from our momentary being

in all respects

simply a falling away

to nothing at all.

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.

Previously published: Heimkehr, October 1981 in Pif Magazine in 2017, Aulis in  Mediterranean Poetry in 2020, Deborah in Scarlet Leaf Review (believe latter in  kaput). I retain all rights to these poems.

 

The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.