Poetry: Selections from Jack D. Harvey

Timor Mortis

We make him dress up,

hooded cloak, scythe and skull,

the Grim Reaper,

put a name to it

sinister slapstick

to cover the skeleton he is.

Furtive footsteps,

heard but not seen

in the wooly uncertain night,

in the darkened hospital ward,

in your last agony;

he's always eager for our passing

to sate him, bate

the restless life around him;

his petty noise in your delirium,

the ghost of sound,

echoing against old men’s ears,

against the baby's tiny shell of an ear,

against the nightingale's sweet

voice, captivating;

all these and others competing

for your last glimmer of attention

on your way out.

When he comes, when he comes,

the soft schuss of a shot skier,

making his lone descent.

These sounds and your last movements,

pure and simple as moonlight 

and the trees bending in the wind

come together, foretell the end,

one way or another

peaceful, resigned, painful, brutal,

in our midst, death, like clockwork,

regular and familiar as the morning sun.

Even in the last extreme

hardly ever do we say "enough!"

and mean it,

grasping for one more day,

one more blink of an eye,

one more good green spring,

we continue to hope,

until cut to the quick,

stopped cold,

we hear his voice say come

and away we go,

leaving all we know behind,

departing for whatever 

eternity holds of emptiness,

of death, of nothing,

of even less than nothing.

Limitless, hidden beyond horizons

the gape of the unknown;

at the end of the road

undisclosed forever what fate 

that fearsome spectre,

voluminously berobed,

that everlasting mystery 

holds for all of us

in his bony emphatic hand.

The Yellow Emperor

When the last lithe leopard

in the emperor's crowded preserve

leapt down from his arboreal perch

pink-mouthed and mottled,

where was the degenerated emperor,

taped and bandaged,

with all his skill for naught and

disowned by his own people,

slowly, grandly, greedily dying?

Nowhere else but

still as stone

in the hospital,

such as it was,

his golden skin wan 

in the crepuscular hospital light.

Was it his own disease, 

newly invented,

or whose disease was it?

Lengthy discourse

rattling out of the 

discountenanced doctor, 

made clear the cancer or 

so he called it,

was the last stop on the line.

Brutish cells, voyaging

in giant argosies of destruction

turn yellow to sallow

and, dappled with deceit,

dangerous sympathetic

friends and courtiers

dimly seen, daily on view

became more distinct,

more sovereign,

as death clumped closer

and the flesh, forever awake,

became a burden.

Death as a unicorn

in nurse's uniform

bides his time,

patient as Griselda

among bottles and needles.

Toward the last morning,

fading with the stars

the Yellow Emperor saw clear

as alpine forests, close as lovers

the luminous jade-green eyes

of a dragon, watchful and quiet,

watched it fade 

to its beautiful oblivion of myth

and the emperor arose,

a live wire of life and strength,

leaving cap and clothes,

leaping through the dawn

he went, bright as the Paschal lamb

he went, bright as the morning he went,

dancing to the harmony and peace

of nothing at all, 

to eternal heavenly equivalence; 

kingpin of the indeterminate, 

internal joyful void

where all power and life begin.   

Sacred The Braid

(Euripides' Bacchae)

Hieros ho plokamos,

up till now

improvident horn of plenty;

a schoolboy theme,

an easy text,

an easy ticket,

a mediocrity.

Up till now,

hieros ho plokamos,

the good guy

was darn cute

on a horse;

now he's just another cowpoke

coming in

on a scrubby mare,

somber and stupid.

Up till now,

hieros ho plokamos,

salamanders died

pitifully in the fire;

now they swim

through flames

like glittering salmon.

Up till now

the unicorn

a white horn

delicate as snow,

a sacred mane,

a head

white as bone.

But now vultures

make nests of blood

in his mane,

turn his white

to Phoenician red. 

His horn towering

frightful, awful

as the pillar of Taharka

looks down

on the Sphinx,

on the Acropolis,

on glorious buzzing Bangkok.

Hieros ho plokamos,

he stands there

sweet and young,

forever divine,

forever extinct,

starting his course;

look now

imagine

he nears his distant end.

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. He has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies and has been writing poetry since he was sixteen. He lives in a small town near Albany, New York.