Oprah Winfrey Interviews Cormac Mccarthy Poem by Allan Thorne

He lies there
Sprawled on the couch
Like some oversized
Lizard in the sun.
Smiling and tasting the air
With the tip of his tongue.

“Some people are just lucky, ” he says.
“Luck is distributed on a bell curve
Just like everything else.
There is a luckiest person in the world
At one end
And the unluckiest person in the world
At the other.
I have been very lucky.”

The interviewer is
Noticeably impacted by this statement
She sits back in her seat
Like she has been slapped.

He goes on to tell a story
How at one point he was jobless and staving
And a check for twenty five thousand dollars
Arrived unexpectedly in the mail.

The interviewer has spent a lifetime preaching
Cause and effect,
Hard work and talent
And the success that will surely follow
When these are applied to a life.

Yet here before her is this heretic!
This obviously successful man
Who is ascribing it all to luck.
All is confusion.

In another, less enlightened age
She might call to have him burnt
At the stake.
As it is she cuts to a commercial.