Luck

“Why scold a child who knows nothing of
zoology and wants a bird with five wings?”

—Rimbaud

Dictionaries cannot
define luck
as accurately as an abacus
can count cards.

So, let the boy
dream of indecencies
or money. In time
luck will turn toward him

its tortured face,
and he will recognize
a thousand risked moments
fused into the fact

that luck is not a lady,
spell, or sin. It resides
in the sheets of lovers,
the graves of parentage—

in the whiskey bottle,
the perfume, the milk.
It is always entering,
it is what we mistake for love.