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Lucky Break
by Terry Ehret
In Terry Ehret’s Lucky Break, the present is not a moment fixed in time, but a dangerous realm where the poet searches for “something worth worshipping.” Pulled by history and memory into the past, and propelled toward the future by the possibilities of what “might be,” Ehret makes her negotiations with contingency. She insists emphatically that “There is nothing to fear,” but it’s the brave honesty of her poems that make this so. By turns tender and fierce, Lucky Break offers the reader courage in lieu of consolation. Ehret quotes Mallarmé’s dictum: “Each book a tomb in miniature for the soul.” A soul could rest easy in Lucky Break.
—Gary Young, author of No Other Life
 TERRY EHRET is one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press. Literary awards for her previous collections, Lost Body and Translations from the Human Language, include the National Poetry Series, the Commonwealth Club of California Book Award, and the Nimrod/ Hardman Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. In 1997, as the writer-on-site at the Oakland Museum of California, she created a poetry audio tour for the Gallery of California Art; and from 2004-2006, she served as Sonoma County Poet Laureate. She has taught writing at San Francisco State and Sonoma State Universities, California College of the Arts, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with the California Poets in the Schools Program. She currently leads private workshops in Sonoma County, California, where she lives with her family. Lucky Break is her third book of poems.
 POEMS FROM Lucky Break
Lucky Break
A white marble wheel
has many uses: travel,
for example, or shaping clay;
a simple lathe but, like any tool,
needing balance. Else
the center, which is empty,
cannot hold, lets loose
its own purpose,
fragments flying untethered
from any force centripetal,
explodes its form, stone
wheeling, broken
into clavicle and pelvis,
petal and wing,
like disaster,
like the first creation:
joy and death spilling
from the cracked jar—ah!
the thing it isn’t and
ah! the thing it yet
might be.
What It’s About
with thanks to Allen Ginsberg
Spring is about standing in the dark under the darker eucalyptus
and feeling the future like an ache in the throat,
in the lungs like drowning,
like waiting in silence for the bombs to fall.
Bombs are about who’s lying and who’s counting, and counting
is about numbers we agree to. Agreeing
is about investing your money in the same things.
Money is about money and also about what you don’t have.
Not having is about pain and pain is about being broken each year,
being broken by promises by grace by the bursting
seed-pods of deceit
and telling ourselves we will heal or if we cannot
telling ourselves it’s our place to be stupid and broken.
Our place is about three cars in the driveway
and streetlights and sidewalks
and sidewalks are about what’s worth protecting.
Protection is about terror and destruction and inevitable suffering
and suffering is always
about birth, about stains and mystery
and mysteries are always about the silence
the aweful, chilling silence that fills the right now before
whatever is about to happen happens.
March 18, 2008
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