Richard Lyons
Who Gets Lucky?
All afternoon I am waiting to see a seal poke its head up,
but the bay won’t shock its own benevolence.
My blood travels far to illustrate its longing, capillaries
like the Panama Canal lowering locks. The future
comes to a dim pencil’s tip to measure cellular longevity.
Maybe loneliness adapts to scarcity’s wind. In 1986,
my mother doesn’t see her end so time widens its maw.
Time dies. Says here—red parrots eat smaller green parrots.
Berries taste of the mud they siphon. A blackbird hops
and then swoops to catch a wolf spider. Who gets lucky?
Memory-glitches tantalize trails into a life we can’t recognize.
Rats gnaw drywall but leave the patina our troubled egos
seem taken with. Smitten is a former century’s term
for what insists—our six quarts of blood. Weaver-birds
twine new nests, flapping yellow wings, courting females.
Jungle flowers begin to flash, almost assuming a pattern,
but letting it go, as if a loss of stamina is the best way to survive.
Altruistic armadillos share their den with muskrats. No one is alien.