Good Luck

by Robert Nisbet

It was his great good luck
not to have had an expensive education
nor pull nor place nor privilege at all,
but that he, living alone, in ’98,
should be working for Murphy’s,
a small firm in a small country town,
buying and selling musical instruments,
which he could play, restore and love,
knowing the wise melancholy of the alto sax,
of soul and swing, and that he should, that year,
meet Rose. She,
living with two burly Labradors
and her garden’s swarm of tits and starlings,
in a stone-walled cottage, smudged with ivy,
would, when he played blues to her,
close her eyes, smile, tap her foot,
say, Yes,  yes.