We are committed to atoms, to their unseen ways of taking up space. But also to irrefutable luck that gives us green tea on Wednesdays, a half-eaten bowl of blackberries. Luck that spills over the luck of pears on the sideboard and yellow bananas in the blue ceramic bowl. Luck of sweet Nellie, newly adopted dog, and sage leaves and wooden crucifixes. If you give up luck, God will desert you so the folk tale goes. Today God may lie just beyond the plum trees. Just beyond the rusted iron gate to the orchard of my childhood and the arm of reason. He could be dangerous. So was the planet system, but Copernicus still said the sun was the heart of so many lonely orbits. If we give up luck, will we lose mystery? Because there is a way the field out back flames orange just after the sun wheels' last turn. It is atomic science. It is how these perfected forms - three flecked eggs two slatted chairs - can come to seem an idea of goodness if we're lucky enough to catch them at dusk when they're hardly in touch with the earth, and we know them by longing they displace. Copyright © Susan Conley. http://www.wlu.edu/~shenando | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...MOTLEY: THE GHOST by WALTER JOHN DE LA MARE WHEN DE CO'N PONE'S HOT by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR THE ADOPTED CHILD by FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS ODE ON MELANCHOLY by JOHN KEATS RUNNING THE BATTERIES by HERMAN MELVILLE TO THE UNIMPLORED BELOVED by EDWARD SHANKS RECONCILIATION by WALT WHITMAN |