Barbara Hamby
Ode to Luck and All His Roosters and Dogs
I’ll tell you who’s lucky, the bedraggled stray dogs
hanging around a big Buddhist monastery
near Ulan Ude just south of Lake Baikal. They follow
the pilgrims around the perimeter of the compound
and scarf the cookies and candy left at the prayer wheels
for the Buddha. “Hey, we’re the Buddha, too,”
they bark at anyone who gives them a dirty look,
which no one does, because they’re all down
with the four noble truths, and if the dogs are kind of ratty
to be the Buddha, they’re the Buddha’s dogs,
and all through Russia dogs roam the streets in little groups,
not paying much heed to humans,
because they’ve got their dog business, and the prayer wheels
we are rotating while chanting, “om mani padme hum,”
seem to be a part of the great Russian hunt for luck,
which seems to start with touching the knees and feet
of bronze heroes of the Revolution in Moscow metro stations
built with convict labor by Stalin, but Irina
in the Bulgakov museum shows me where she stands
to ask the great writer for aid, and when I stand on the spot,
I feel his mojo shooting through me like the asteroid
that flattened 800 miles of taiga in Siberia,
and then near Lake Baikal when shamanism becomes
part of the mix, we see ribbons and prayer flags
tied to posts and trees, and at the top of Mt. Chersky
overlooking the lake I tie a dirty ponytail scrungy
I find on the ground to the most sacred of trees,
covered by sky blue scarves and fancy prayer flags,
and I make my fervent wish, but as we walk back
to the ski lift that swept us over fields
of columbine and dandelions I think that my wish
doesn’t have a chance next to all those fancy flags,
but I look up and see an eagle circling overhead,
and I’ve read Buriyat shamans revere the eagle
above all animals and so maybe my dirty scrungy will work,
and at the Buddhist monastery at Ulan Ude
I buy a proper flag for my sister and a sick friend
and turn about a million prayer wheels,
sorry that I don’t have cookies for the dogs and the cows,
who are wandering and making cow pies
and the chickens and roosters, all of us creatures
in thrall to our desire for candy, seeds, apples,
kisses, but looking for a way out, too, a dirt road
disappearing in the distance, a path that begins
with one step and then another until we’re in another world,
too much like our own to be our own.
Barbara Hamby is the author of five books of poems, most recently On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014) published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in Poetry and her book of short stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar. Her sixth book of poems, Bird Odyssey, will be published by Pitt in 2018.