South x South: Poems from Antarctica

History of Luck

15 The History of Luck Some ancient penguins were red. Today one kind of penguin lives in abandoned houses in Namibia, standing around like people at a wedding. Others, for example in the Chathams, burrow like shy, dark thumbs. Who knows why one is one and one is not. In the late 1950s an American geologist in Antarctica walked away from four plane crashes in a row. That becomes stupid, like somebody hit by lightning twice, once raising his left hand, once his right. Stepping from his second wreck Hemingway said, my luck, she eeez running very good. My plane was hit by lightning in Costa Rica once, buck and swerve as the cabin lights surged on and off. What is luck, is it a kind of underwear you put on before a date, is it being born you and not your brother? We are all lucky because some lemur long ago remembered to evolve gorgeous amber eyes. We are lucky that our parents’ parents survived smallpox, dengue fever, being raped by Cossacks, crossing the flooded plank by groping with a numb boot in the muddy brown water beneath which the tops of drowned trees waved like dead hands, survived bear maulings and influenza, caesarian sections with a jackknife and a swig of vodka, survived the long absences when the father of the grandfather of the grandfather joined the sealers and was gone for three years at a go, his hands so cold on the rigging he thought he would never touch the deck, try pots boiling over, beatings for insubordination, the time the ship went aground, then, just as suddenly, washed back off of the reef, the time he survived being robbed in Brazil, survived scurvy and tetanus and not being able to brush his own teeth after his hands were burned one year, survived being stabbed by a gaff hook when pitch and roll reversed themselves, survived boredom and fear and the month of dark nights 16 when suicide sat in his belly like hunger, we are lucky because fins became hands and hands became nimble enough to flamenco the guitar strings and win prizes, win bets, win hearts, hearts that we are lucky now to have as well because no matter how many times people stab us in them and no matter how often the lightning strikes the people next to us, we still know that it won’t hit us, it can’t hit us, not even in the middle of all this ice—after all, look how lucky we always are. ...