Luck

I used up a life’s worth of it in a flash
twenty-five years ago, working as a maid
at the Caribbean Motel on Monterey Bay.
One glittering blue afternoon, without thinking,
I heaved an industrial-sized laundry bag
of wet towels over the rail
of a third-floor balcony.
I’d seen other maids do the same.
It beat dragging the sack down three flights of stairs
after hours of cleaning bathrooms,
then climbing back up.

But the woman carrying her infant across the lot
didn’t notice she was in a restricted area:
twenty pounds of damp laundry
missed her by seconds.
I remember the mother’s startled cry,
saw it fluttering towards me
as my knees and stomach liquefied
into something like sickness.

I drank whiskey
straight from the bottle that night.
And because I was twenty-one
and didn’t know any better, bought a dozen
sweet rolls at a bakery the next morning
and left the box, along with a shakily written
letter of apology, in the room of the couple
whose baby’s skull I had almost crushed.

You’d think I’d be grateful every minute
of my life after that.
But when I ran for the bus yesterday,
reaching the door just as it pulled away,
I wanted to stamp my foot like a child.
I wail to myself about noisy neighbors,
cry over rejected poems. No luck,
I think fiercely, sincerely believing
that mantra, as the thin ice bearing my actions
cracks web-like in ever widening circles,
but continues to hold.