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As usual you weren’t there
when the Lucky Seven Gas Station
blew high the feckless night:
the seven lucky pumps embedded with seven horseshoes
the seven rabbit tails
with the fur still quivering
even the strip of four-leaf clovers-all disappearing
from the face of Highway 76
like so many pimples bursting.
Ranchers said horses whinnied
forty-seven miles away. As usual you didn’t see
the seven horsemen
from the Montana Fire Brigade,
Pugh, Hugh, Barney Magrew, Cuthburt, Dibble and Gruh
trying to save Lucky Joe’s cases of ankh signs in silver, gold and brass,
his wall of good-luck lanterns with dragons,
the shelf of ivory elephants and obsidian weasels,
the prehistoric trilobite amulets, the coprolites
of the eohippus and the two hundred silk house banners
with the good-luck symbol “Fu.” Oh, yes, you watched it on the evening news,
once, twice, three charmed times, then seven,
Lucky Joe’s spectacles descending from a freaky sky
and falling in Little Billy Bray’s dump truck a mile away,
not a scratch on them. And you thought, odd, isn’t it,
how someone’s always there ton film the unexpected,
a plane veering into a teepee, someone’s caught it,
blind meteor slamming caboose. But deep in that talisman heart of yours, you knew,
watching Angela Armstrong’s diaper bag blown to shreds
for the seventieth times seventh time, you were watching
seven hundred and seven years in seven minutes.
They were finished: Solomon’s Temple,
the famine in Ethiopia. And as usual, you didn’t smell
the asbestos, the sweat,
the distended bellies, the skin. Oh yes, you tried,
you ran to your local cross to give up blood and three pairs of tight shoes.
Here, some unlucky soul can run on these.
Keep the economy booming,
your generous offering because once again you were safe
on one of the seven days of the week
on one of the seven divisibe planets.
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