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  • The Reasons, and: The Plum Tree, and: What Is the Likelihood
  • Robin Becker (bio)

The Reasons

I came for the impassive face of Taos Mountain, its stoic calm, green veins, rock thrusts.

To walk beneath the giant cottonwoods of Burch Street, an arching, trembling canopy.

For the grazers, their eternity of grass.

To conjure, in the scent of sage, the woman I was—trusting as snow pack, loyal as the hawk to her hungers.

What might she say to the one betrayed?

All resilience, she swings along the trail, doesn’t see the algorithm of fault lines in my face. I let her pass

into the good, long run she’ll have. [End Page 31]

The Plum Tree
for Carolyn

Like Shiva, many-armed, already ancient when my friend bought the place,

the tree’s cracked limbs clawed the air, where nine feeders hosted generations—noisy

chickadee and siskin, nuthatch and woodpecker. Desiccated, unyielding, the tree drew, in spring,

indigo bunting and grosbeak to its withering. She could not bear to take it

down and did not, year after year. When a sharp-shinned hunted from a wire,

the farmyard emptied, feeders like out-of-season decorations ornamenting a leaflessness—

One year, thin saplings rose around the great dead tree, celebrants about a maypole,

and the sweet scent of blossoming returned

in the miniature plum trees the birds seeded. Young keepers of the temple fire,

garlanded in white, they circled the goddess-tree, their fallen petals

marking a sacred wheel, within which the dead cede ground to the living. [End Page 32]

What Is the Likelihood

of my seeing, in New Mexico, her New York apartment building on tv, a special about the meat-packing district and high-end retail replacing commercial pork? Still, the flowering trees and women in sleeveless knits, the clips of Gansevoort Street and Sarabeth’s bakery report the news— this spring her new love pushes polished, bronze, art deco doors, revolving.

Robin Becker

Robin Becker’s sixth collection of poems, Domain of Perfect Affection (U of Pittsburgh P), was a finalist for the Audre Lorde and Lambda Book Awards. She writes a column on the poetry scene, “Field Notes,” for the Women’s Review of Books. She’s currently completing a new collection of poems called “Snow in Summer.” Becker enjoys the ongoing charting of her Boomer cohort.

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