Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, Mind In Motion, Slow Dancer, The New Laurel Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The University of Texas Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Piedmont Journal of Poetry and a number of other 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, worked and will probably die in upstate New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.
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| The Red Planet |
Music Hath Charm
Sweetbody told me
that in the Republic
of Mars
surgeons operate
not with scalpels
in their mitts but
with musical instruments-
can this be true?
The ragged edges of
make-believe are
strained by that metal.
Who can't see the
trumpeting surgeon
blowing an abdomen open
with the brass,
or the piccolo twiddling
away the cerebellum?
What fancy irritations
for the bemused patient.
Locked in death,
the corpse is a feast
of sound;
the human recovery
a triumphal procession.
Death allegro,
life andante.
Maybe on Mars
concerts are swashbuckling
events,
redder than the planet itself.
First appeared in Piedmont Review of Poetry
Out In the Country
All my fantasies
have fled the old homestead;
the hacienda’s as empty of heat
as winter’s candles.
Still as a painting
the moon hangs
in the snoring night;
twice-pale she looks,
Diana
surprised by the hunter.
Hounds skate down moonbeams
like avenging furies;
the stag, a shadow, a ghost,
runs over the meadows.
Running far from my native shores
I let the wonderful cooler native women
play with me, titillate me, adulate me,
until my weary head
rests at last
on the anvil.
At night,
satiate and subdued,
I walk on the beach,
lonely stars above
the encompassing sea.
Lonely, I look at the night;
to my fallible mirror of self
Prince Hamlet or Nial
at the least,
stalking, brooding on the strand;
to rutting teens,
more like an apparition,
an old fool
doddering in the moonlight.
Well, even Athens looked
like a heap of stone
to a seagull flying
high
as Hitler’s arm once was;
we souls below
swoop close,
try to embrace
in tortures measured
to the goose-stepping firmament.
Saint Lawrence,
well done over the coals,
put up a reckless good front
besieged;
passus est or assus est,
died or fried,
it was over;
this fire, his life,
burnt out.
For us a lesson;
a thousand enemies gnaw at
brains and bones alike,
defy them all,
at the crack of doom defy;
it’s soon enough
the stinting grass
grows over our heads.
A.U.C.
There is that in God
which is not gaud
feeding the chickens
Honorius muttered in Latin,
not brooking a report
that Rome
had
how you say?
had been
like a chicken
its neck wrung.
Jesus, the beautiful faces,
Vestals,
the villas where Sallust
the beautiful noble stones
the shithouses, aqueducts, roads
ROME DEAD?
but she fed the world
a long time
fed
a line of law
and reason
Respect:
Lars Porsenna
and the bloody emperors
hairy Vandals
Alaric alert
Neal
All honor
her hills, her people,
her purple
covered the steppes,
commanded
the western isles.
In the ruins of Rome,
in Illyria, in Britain,
bitter winter brings down
heaven’s wrath;
hailstones spatter
like pennies,
clattering on bronze
and marble alike.
We will not see Hadrian
again rebuilding the walls.
~First appeared in Poetrybay
~Jack D. Harvey
