Poetry By Jack D. Harvey

His Fifty-Sixth Birthday

On the marches of March

we march on regardless;

birthdays bring

no one out of the

woodwork;

even the birthday boy

saws his horse in two.

Spectatio, sweet delicate

mouse girl believes;

Swanhild the swan maiden

swoops down on her

priapic darling.

O idle Ides,

O pretty days

boating along, my idol,

I ruffle your rough hair;

you toy with my

veiny tiller

while the winds

with cheeks

bulging like buttocks

blow soft gales.

Our bark flies

like a flea

over lake and loch.

Wales guards England

on the marches;

in the garden of Eden

sword-bladed angels

stand like cataracts.

In the urban wastes

I guard you.

Watch out, forwards

and scouts,

danger ahead;

enemies, fiends

as relentless

as German

as hard as

stones in the cradle.

  

Little Liza

That's your name?

Butter could never melt

your Thai mouth,

making English words

in far-off Bangkok,

where playgirls

looking for cock to bang,

what else,

zip along

on motor scooters,

looking for you, brother,

taking you

right, right, left, left,

right to Hotel Ecstasy,

right into your arms,

palsied with desire.

Two by two

or in a bunch,

like Brantôme's band

of jolly jumpers,

the black-maned cowgirls

of Soi Cowboy

stand at the doors,

the windows,

cruise the streets

wide-eyed and ready for

bumpy combat, a little

of the old in and out;

for a long moment

more than a thumb plugged

in the eternal hole in the dike.

The value of satisfaction

in the vales and dales

of loamy female loins;

your wild oats measured out

in the coin of any realm.

Leetle kid,

you fockee me?

Shy girl-lashed

paratroopers hem

and haw.

Beautiful, transporting as bhang

in this carnivorous market,

the boyhood dreams come true

and the boys dream,

dropping their pants and

Little Liza or

whatever your proper name,

your dark Asian eyes,

your furry doolittle

not wet with

tears of love for

me or Joe Bunkbuddy

or any little thing.  

Ravishment of the Holy Wisdom

With a heroic cry, I throw myself

on thoughtful Her, the fount of all,

whose Platonic shoulders hold up

a host of philosophers searching

for that hard stone,

Sophia, Sapientia,

the Greeks and Romans called it,

that aspect of God as wisdom;

the edge of Him

we think we can know.

My profane logos,

Christ's intact loaf

on its base erected,

invades, invokes

the opera singer in Her

and striving to hit high C

while diving into

Her sea of prolixity,

She cracks the shaky dome

of Byzantium's Hagia Sophia;

Hers and Hers alone.

Her legions of words

become its stones,

thousands of precious pieces,

beaten down by time to ruins

and rebuilt and again rebuilt

to pure light immanent

from the enormous trembling dome.

In varied embraces and poses,

to break the routine of rapture,

I assume the aspects of saints and

eremites, sinners of note,

palsied misers, lawbreakers,

kings, popes, emperors,

royal oafs of some distinction;

anything to keep Her attention.

I don't have it and she

dismisses my efforts, tells

of the sunrise of earlier ages,

concerned architects, geometers,

on their rounds meandering

through the Hagia Sophia,

peering through the keyholes,

seeing more than

what is in plain sight;

sensing dilapidation and decay

behind the walls, tapping, tapping

the hidden vulnerabilities

of stone and mortar.

Far from the wisdom

heaving down from above,

they picture this

holy massive ruin renewed,

revived in glory for all to see;

its substantial presence

bringing God down,

beneath the dome

for all to worship.

Meanwhile, we two

lose the thread of discourse,

flop around among

the dead blossoms of Plato's

prose, trying to find something

we can use, a fragment

we can bring to bear

on the problem at hand:

the Son of Man in the second seat.

The Holy Wisdom sees no sense in it;

the church is Hers, but

Jesus, incarnate

forever debases Her power,

Her feminine wisdom sublimely

rendered irrelevant, out of place.

Graceful, practical,

softening under my tuberous

ponderosity, losing

interest in the labor at hand,

She sighs about sacred words,

sacred works, incisions

brought down from on high;

the sharp light of grace

brought down in a narrow beam,

divine insights piled on a plate;

John's severed head opened up

to show how close he was

to the one who brought more

than water could bless.

So we sit under a portico

someplace or other

in Byzantium, where we started,

in the warm spring

discussing God the Son,

the Father, the Holy Ghost.

The sun sinks below the horizon,

the cold moonlit nights progress

and in Byzantium

the dome will rise again.

She bites my ear

in a moment of exasperation;

I don't care.

We will build again.

Larger than life beside me,

she tries to bind me to her reasoning;

in her passion shaking her head,

animating her white neck to

splendid anatomical disarray;

I lie long hours with her

like a sled dog after a hard day's run,

putting forward my reckoning;

we get nowhere at all.

My faith in the Holy Wisdom

corrupted by my doubt in God incarnate,

tainted by my failure to see

God's wisdom as love.

I complain to Her about

the imperfect complexion

of God's justice, his unjust

power to tip the scales

any way he wants.

She smiles and looks askance.

We push and pull, like sumo wrestlers,

in this battle that never ends.

The discourse goes on

and we are no nearer the truth

of the Holy Wisdom, the sense of it,

the intent of God and His angels,

lost in the vault of heaven, the intent

to tell us something, impart something,

a vision, a divine process,

constructed again and again on ruins.

But it's not at all like that,

that's the little we do know;

the painful bit in our teeth.

Never, never will we know more

than the divine coruscation,

the decorations that leave us cold

to the core, caring no more for

a fake cake that is all surface;

a pretty thing with no heart

that we can see.

Caring no more for wisdom,

holy or not, that we

cannot take in our hands,

bring to understanding in our minds

and make one with our human flesh.   

The Ishmaelites

Then give them exactly

what they deserve, the

god come from them, the

prophet born from them, the

child gone from them,

the forest hid from

them, the desert their portion,

and let them depart from

us and let them take

nothing from us and

give nothing in return.

Let them wander, lonely,

graceful, proud,

far away from us.

   

 

Ganger Rolf

Got lots of heart

and guts, you

walking bulwark

of the middle ages,

son of Ketill Flatnose,

brother of Harold Harfagar

so they say,

yourself ancestor of a famous line;

your troop of soldiering

homicidal drudges,

Vikings, Northmen, Danes,

whatever name came to

the minds of Francia's

peaceable populace or

writ by frightened monks

keeping score in the cloisters;

they felt the sword's weight,

saw the spear's point;

landing in the clear,

your band of long-shipped

blonde-bearded buccaneers

coming from bays and creeks

carved victory like a

chef carves meat.

You ravaged Francia's ragged coast,

boxed it in and left lovely

Rouen a ruin;

bought off in Paris

your ponderosity in gold

even for a king

too much; you got

to keep the westlands.

Pacts and marriages,

willy-nilly, you didn't care,

walking before or after

a broken horse,

so the legends say;

stories made up

as time went on.

Your brilliant rollicking fable

hits us in the face still,

scraps of it only, but enough.

Dust you are, become famous,

become famous

as the dust you trod upon;

marbled up in Rouen,

a statue far away in Fargo.

Nobody sang your song better than you

and it remains with you.

Rolf, bulky ponderous hero,

scant proof of you,

no history to speak of tells us

anything precise

and that's to the good.

I haven't the faintest idea about you,

no real conception from the little left,

a man without a horse,

a raider, a rover,

but I know your life

like a boy knows his dad.     

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, The Antioch Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, Zombie Logic Review, The University of Texas Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines over the years. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the ensuing 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.