Superstitions usually promise safety. Dave Bonta's "Luck (2)" promises a party. It opens like an old tale, "This is the story / of the banjo jubilee," and then lists what sound like folk beliefs. A pregnant woman lays a hand on a banjo for good luck. A burglar flees at the sight of one over his left shoulder. A dog watches one turn yellow in the evening light and begins to howl. I can't say whether any of these belongs to a real tradition. They read as invented, and that is part of the charm: the poem makes up its own folklore and tells it with a straight face.
The construction is plain and quick. There is no rhyme and no fixed meter, just short, speech-like lines in two stanzas, with the sentences breaking across line endings ("the pregnant woman / lays her hand on a banjo") the way a storyteller pauses for effect. The verbs are small and physical: lays, flees, sees, pauses, kicks, jerks. The ampersands, used in place of "and" throughout, give the page a hand-jotted, informal look, as if the story were being passed along by word of mouth. Sound does the work rhyme would otherwise do. "Yellow in alpenglow" is all long vowels and soft l's, and it slides into "howl." Alpenglow is the warm light that touches mountain peaks near sunrise or sunset, so in one phrase the banjo is lit like a landscape. Then comes "a yip & a yelp / & an ai-ai-ai," where the yips snap and the last cry opens into something closer to singing than barking.
The banjo itself is never played. It is touched, seen, glowing, and finally imagined, but the music of this "jubilee" is made by animals. The dog howls, the coyotes answer, and the sound carries to a locksmith, who stops walking. The pairing is neat. The burglar runs from the banjo, and the man whose trade is keeping burglars out is held in place by the noise. He is on his way to a music store, which suggests he is already half in the poem's world.
The stanza's calm breaks at "Just then." The baby kicks, and the mother "jerks her hand back." It is the only sudden movement in a poem of pauses and echoes, and it tells us something about the scene. The banjo must be resting close against her belly, since the kick reaches her hand. That is my inference from the image, not a stated fact. Luck has stopped being an idea and become a bump under the skin. The next lines move into the future: "It will be a girl / at first, & later / a girl who plays banjo." The phrase "at first" is lovely. Being a girl is just the first stage, and the banjo is what she grows into. The woman's gesture of hope turns into a forecast.
Then the closing statement: "There are so many ways / to be lucky / & all of them are round." It's a surprising claim, and it can be read in several ways. A banjo's body is a round drum, and so is a pregnant belly. The story is also circular, since it begins with a hand on a banjo and ends with a child who will play one. Musically, a "round" is a song in which voices enter one after another, repeating the same tune, which is exactly how the dog, the coyotes and the listening locksmith behave. Luck here is not a single stroke of fortune but a loop, with each thing answering the last.
That is what makes the poem worth reading closely. In a few lines it treats luck as a matter of connection, not chance: a hand, a light, a howl, a kick, each calling up the next. The title's "(2)" hints that this may belong to a sequence, though from the title alone I can't say more. Taken by itself, it is a small, light-footed piece that makes a very large word feel warm, a little funny, and round.