The New Egypt

By Robin Becker

I think of my father who believes
a Jew can outwit fate by owning land.
Slave to property now, I mow
and mow, my destiny the new Egypt.
From his father, the tailor, he learned not
to rent but to own; to borrow to buy.
To conform, I disguise myself and drag
the mower into the drive, where I ponder
the silky oil, the plastic casing, the choke.
From my father, I learned the dignity
of exile and the fire of acquisition,
not to live in places lightly, but to plant
the self like an orange tree in the desert
and irrigate, irrigate, irrigate.

Solar

By Robin Becker

The desert is butch, she dismisses your illusions
about what might do to make your life
work better, she stares you down and doesn’t say
a word about your past. She brings you a thousand days,
a thousand suns effortlessly each morning rising.
She lets you think what you want all afternoon.
Rain walks across her mesa, red-tailed hawks
writhe in fields of air, she lets you look at her.
She laughs at your study habits, your orderly house,
your need to name her “vainest woman you’ve ever met.”
Then she turns you toward the voluptuous valleys,
she gives you dreams of green forests,
she doesn’t care who else you love.
She sings in the grass, the sagebrush, the small trees
struggling and the tiny lizards scrambling
up the walls. You find her when you’re ready
in the barbed wire and fence posts, on the scrub where you walk
with your parched story, where she walks, spendthrift,
tossing up sunflowers, throwing her indifferent
shadow across the mountain. Haven’t you guessed?
She’s the loneliest woman alive but that’s her gift;
she makes you love your own loneliness,
the gates to darkness and memory. She is your best, indifferent
teacher, she knows you don’t mean what you say.
She flings aside your technical equipment,
she requires you to survive in her high country
like the patient sheep and cattle who graze and take her
into their bodies. She says lightning, and
get used to it. Her storms are great moments
in the history of American weather, her rain remakes the world,
while your emotional life is run-off from a tin roof.
Like the painted clown at Picuris Pueblo
who started up the pole and then dropped into the crowd,
anonymous, she paws the ground, she gallops past.
What can you trust? This opening, this returning,
this arroyo, this struck gong inside your chest?
She wants you to stay open like the hibiscus
that opens its orange petals for a single day.
At night, a fool, you stand on the chilly mesa,
split open like the great cleft of the Rio Grande Gorge,
trying to catch a glimpse of her, your new, long-term companion.
She gives you a sliver of moon, howl of a distant dog,
windy premonition of winter.

Quaker Meeting, The Sixties

By Robin Becker

Seeing my friend’s son in his broad-brimmed hat

and suspenders, I think of the Quakers

who lectured us on nonviolent social action

every week when I was a child. In the classrooms

we listened to those who would not take up arms,

who objected, who had accepted alternative

service in distant work camps and showed

slides of hospitals they helped to build.

On Wednesdays, in Meeting for Worship,

when someone rose to speak,

all the energy in the room

flew inside her mouth, empowering her to tell

what she had seen on her brief

encounter with the divine: sometimes, a parable,

a riddle, a kindness. The fall that we were seventeen,

we scuffed our loafers on the gravelly path

from the Meetinghouse, while maple and elm

leaves sailed around our shoulders   

like tiny envelopes, our futures sealed inside.

Despite the war in Vietnam, I felt safer

than I ever would again. Perhaps

those aged, protective trees had cast a spell

on us, or maybe the nonviolent Quaker God

had set up a kingdom right there—

suburban Philadelphia. Looking back, I see how

good deeds and thoughts climbed with us to the attic

room for Latin, descended to the gym for sports,

where we hung from the praiseworthy scaffolds

of righteous behavior. We prepared to leave

for college, armed with the language of the American

Friends and the memories of Thanksgiving

dinners we’d cooked for the unfortunates:

borrowing our parents’ cars to drive

downtown to the drop-off point, racing back

to play our last field hockey match. Grim center forwards

shook hands before the whistle, the half-backs’

knee-pads strapped on tight; one varsity team vanquished another.