JACK D. HARVEY - POEMS

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, Mind In Motion, Slow Dancer, The Antioch Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The University of Texas Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Piedmont Journal of Poetry and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines over the years, many of which are probably kaput by now, given the high mortality rate of poetry magazines.   

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. He once owned a cat that could whistle "Sweet Adeline," use a knife and fork and killed a postman.

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                                        A La Fin
 
​
In the night of love,
in the light of love,
we repair the ravaged goddess;
tinkling bells, a ballad worn out;
love,
hanging heavy on the heart,
love,
like a sunken boat,
green in the sea,
love like a
delicate ivory contraption,
love’s body like a strong soldier,
 
stronger in battle. 

     
                             And Proud Of It
 
​
All vanity,
said the preacher of Ecclesiastes,
picking his way through
his ennobling prose,
 
all beneath.
 
Hills and streams
the backs of our ears
the wind at our backs
our Hamlets not real;
man's inhumanity or love
incompetent and
incomplete.
 
Rock of the hearth
star and soil
all vain and thin
wasted with self-feeling;
 
to be alone
and adore
the gape of time
and ages gone, too,
is no powerful liniment;
pour good, pour often
what speck we have,
waste as you will;
on a corner
at the end of time
death
waiting
will not care
will not spare you
nor scant you
eternal rest.
 
 

                                      New Bedford


​Before dawn
​lines leave the dock,
bare table floating.
Thin coils in tubs,
hard hooks;
the flickering steel-blue
unknowing fish waiting.
 
At sea, lines lean out
long and deep;
hooked, gaffed,
silver piles shiver on deck,
then lie grey and still as stone.
Before night, turn the boat home,
three stars gleam over the harbor;
 
the work is done. 

                               Short and Sweet
 
​
Rosie's fine legs
under the barstool;
loved
by how many midgets? 

 
    
                                     Exuma 1967
 
​
Powdery blue fish
your intricate
leavening describes
the ocean in meditation.
You hang like
tin crescents
in a forest,
pointing
every which way
to the absolute.
 
The coral fan spreads
her dandy branches,
the anemone gulps
with longing
for sun and rain,
steady providers
of other climes;
for change, too,
the rose sighs
in her
cut-out garden.
 
Such blooms, such creatures
find their way,
their blind will
moving like the wind;
wild geese
home to roost,
oracles
marooned and mute
in the vast
the magnificent room
of countless things.