Every day luck gets stuck in a king palmed in a card sharp’s hand, pressed between a rope and a tightrope walker’s toe; it’s claustrophobic in a promise; a wedding ring chokes it; sure, it’ll ride a wild sperm into the ovum, but a family in an RV every June offends it; it likes a head-on collision; it likes to see the heart beating in the surgeon’s hands; it likes entering a people in the droplets of a cough or hearing a tornado twist off a church steeple; but here comes another one who’s figured it out, a lucky so-and-so glowing from head to well-made foot and promising the stars to which the people look, eyes full of questions they hope the stars won’t answer.
Against History
Let the moon keep the sea of nectar. Let it hoard eternal dust.
I’m on the way to Zhong Xing
Market, to Zhi Ying
Record Shop.
Let the octopus keep its disguises. Let the deep sea lanternfish glow.
In her shop she’s changing
money from Cleveland,
Vladivostok and Rome.
Press the parade uniforms of the nation. Place the ICBMs in a line.
I’m thinking of the way she
looks at the world like
a deal she struck with time.
Build the factories like
labyrinths of fire. Wrap
the sun in the thick Beijing smog.
Her mind still glides, like a
dove above the flood,
fresh luck in its beak like a twig.
Let a half-a-billion cameras
scan the people, make a
quantum algorithm King Snitch.
I’ve seen her shake the sea
off like a blue-green cape and unclench each bad decree’s clutch.
She knows that history, too,
turns against history:
Last year’s boss is in this year’s jail.
I like the way she rides out
the changes, scanning
the new party boss like a bill.
