Mikko Harvey

Work Life

Happiness: the fiddle you don’t have
to practice — which plays itself.
At least it’s supposed to.
I don’t know.
My job is to polish the jars
that hold the other, smaller jars.
My hands never quite relax, even after
I praise them for being good hands. Restlessness
is how they grieve the past, the dear past,
the deer that passed, then turned
and glanced back—I named him Tony.
The machine we have made is probably
unstoppable at this point.
All the more reason
we should not hurt its feelings.
Jawbone
on a steel floor, I am trying
to see you for the tree that you are. You make the room
seem smaller; I like that.
Nights blowing by like
the pages of a contract, so dry between my fingers.
We were picking blueberries, then the road ended.
We were tickling the planet, then the planet started
ending. Too polite
to scream, weirdly cognizant
of the meat I have eaten, I settle
for making intense eye contact
with the pharmacist.
On the last day, I think we will all take
a very long bike ride, and that
will be that. But where
are we supposed to put
the charming details we’ve been gathering?
The rules of games, the names of knots, the muscles
of animals subdivided
into convenient cubes
and exported by large
transpacific vessels, themselves
rather cuboid in construction, now
that you mention it: the geometry soothing
when viewed from a distance.

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Mikko Harvey is the author of Let the World Have You (House of Anansi, 2022) and Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit (House of Anansi, 2018). His poems appear in places such as The Kenyon Review, The Poetry Review and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. He currently lives in Western Massachusetts.