- The Reasons, and: The Plum Tree, and: What Is the Likelihood
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’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.