By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

There’s a pear-shaped pearl so perfect it has a name, 
     “La Peregrina,” and a history of luck. 
The slave who found it traded it for his freedom. 
      Spanish queens wore it, French kings took it home.
So heavy it slipped its setting, lost in a sofa  
     at Windsor Castle, at a Buckingham Palace ball, 

always found. Burton bought it for Elizabeth Taylor
    and when she realized it was gone again 
she scuffed barefoot and terrified through the shag carpet 
     in their Caesar’s Palace suite, until she heard  
one of the puppies chewing on something and fished
     it out of the tiny mouth, not even scratched. 

Big luck is what most people mean by luck—
  the lottery win, the ground ball bouncing fair, 
the chunk of change from a cousin you never knew. 
  But big luck’s cumbersome, its gravity 
so great it attracts an asteroid belt of envy,  
  a malice moon. And big luck tends to have
a flip side for someone—that understudy only
  gets her break when the star’s leg breaks, too. 

So in real life I’m fond of a finer focus,
   noticing motes of luck as they catch the light,
before they land and are swept away by the daily.  
  This approach is like birding—not for everyone, 
but possible to practice everywhere, added facet  
  of pleasure improved by practice. Any lifelist  

is personal, whether trainspotting, eclipses, or operas. 
    Another person might only be satisfied 
by a purple gallinule, a roseate spoonbill. 
     I’m more like the birder who kept a list  
of birds seen from her backyard, and if that meant
    standing with one foot on the garbage can, 
one braced against the back fence, leaning to see 
     the sharp-shinned hawk down the block—my list, my rules. 

Luckiest of all might be a gift
  for recognizing your luck, its ebb and flow, 
its magnify and shrink, its bloom and furl. 
 When that maple fell and filled our yard, 
but barely kissed our window with thinnest twigs 
  my sister told me “You have good bad luck.”  

No one wants constant fireworks. Better to have  
  luck like fireflies’ unpredictable winks. 
North America has one hundred forty six species  
   of fireflies punctuating our summer nights. 
There are fifteen species just in Kentucky.
 Fifteen species—that’s what I call lucky. 

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Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s work has appeared, among other places, in The Southern Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, and Best American Poetry; her book, A Mind Like This, won the Raz/Shumaker award. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.