If You’re Lucky

You love that Jane Goodall

writes about hope, despite

all the bad news on your doorstep

like a million species as sitting

ducks on their way to extinction.

You get nature’s lust to re-create

itself—how the peregrine falcons

re-nested after the black

air in Sudbury, how the nuked

oleanders in Hiroshima revived,

how the octopus grows

a new arm, the skink a new tail.

But your mind does loop de loops

around Jane’s faith in the human

will to resurrect ourselves.

If you’re lucky, most of life

is boring. You get

up every morning to pee,

turn on the tea kettle,

Zoom through your day.

Sometimes that humdrum

is punctured by breaking news:

an unprecedented storm

bolting up the coast, another

insult from clogged chambers

of Congress, a novel variant

of despotism, or a text

from a friend about her diagnosis.

You recount these aberrations

on your weekly phone calls

with distant relatives, rehash

false memories of good ol’ days

on the levee, where Archie

was just some fiction in Queens,

not the guy behind the deli

counter at Safeway who gives

your BLM t-shirt stink eye.

You’d rather shine light—

like Jane—in the nooks

of possibility, slow

dance with faith

in the One above,

face down fear that this

will be the day the music

dies, confident

in the radiating powers

of your friend’s treatment—

happy for a while, joking

full throttle with the guy

behind the deli counter.