Ephemera

By Robin Becker b. 1951 Robin Becker

The snake, alphabet of one glide, swims

with its keepsake head, periscoping, and then

we lose it in the pond grass, lashed

among the bottom-feeders. Pocketing goggles,

my gaze tends pineward, to the driest sky

in twenty years (also passing, rain predicted),

a month of sun days. In Fairbanks, all-night baseball

and a picnic breakfast Alaskan-style. Someone’s

driving south, to Anchorage, in that luscious uplift

that here will linger long enough for us

to get a sunburn, to get down, to get stung,

to get the hang of happiness and get going.

Get the picture? I do, but just for the moment,

which is why I want it monumental, equestrian,

astride, however I can get it. What’s

passing is June, another; peony’s scent; postcards

from the lower forty-eight. The frog I trod sprang back

intact, all its receptors set on July.

Source: The Horse Fair: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000)

Biography

Poet Robin Becker was born in 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned degrees at Boston University and taught for many years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before returning to Pennsylvania in 1994 to teach at Pennsylvania State University where she was named the 2010 Penn State laureate.

Becker’s many collections of poetry include Personal Effects (1977); Backtalk (1982); Giacometti’s Dog (1990); . . .

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