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Because I had nothing my parents wanted
or could use, I sent them bread---8-Grain and 3-Seed,
San Francisco Sourdough, Jewish Rye,

anything bakehouse with peasant crust.
When they tore into a loaf of Challah
and reported the saffron-colored braids

just right, I rejoiced like a mother---
not one who gives her breast to her child
but one who trusts her child’s care to strangers.

Old Dog

Chose the harbor for its smells---
knotted wrack, sea roach, small gull.
Stumbled then sank where she could
feel the breeze smack her ears, flanks.
Admiring, I watched her bed
the sand, paw cracked shells, let go
the rest. Walking home, she ate
something rank. Then stank. Then slept,
deaf to the mailman, his steps,
deaf to letters clattering
through the slot. I wrote and read.
She woke to scratch and fix her
gaze on me. Sat before the
metal bowl I filled for her.

Head of an Old Man

Fire and water god, successor by sword,
shall we save your teeth and nails for amulets

around our necks, or fast and rent our dresses
when we hear the news?

Accompanied this far by your thunder
and drought, your book of shattered laws,

we follow the procession to the grove
where the living learn to mourn the dying god.

Your head is a melon, a helmet, a planet
we’ll consult as oracle, preserved.

Now, Gardener King, pass into Paradise,
you who mastered the wild technologies,

who swallowed creation, who returned
to inhabit new doctrines, transmigrant,

now invisible, now taking human form.
What form will you take now, Winged Charioteer,

who once bathed your father in a porcelain tub?
You feared him for so long you never learned

how to lose him, both of you too foolish, stubborn.

The New Egypt

I think of my father who believes
a Jew can outrun 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.

GREAT SLEEPS I HAVE KNOWN

Once in a cradle in Norway folded
like Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir
as a ship in full sail transported the dead to Valhalla

Once on a mountain in Taos after making love
in my thirties the decade of turquoise and silver

After your brother walked into the Atlantic
to scatter your mother’s ashes his khakis soaked
to the knees his shirtsleeves blowing

At the top of the cottage in a thunderstorm
once or twice each summer covetous of my solitude

Immediately following lunch
against circadian rhythms, once
in a bunk bed in a dormitory in the White Mountains

Once in a hollow tree in Wyoming
A snow squall blew in the guide said tie up your horses

The last night in the Katmandu Guest House
where I saw a bird fly from a monk’s mouth
a consolidated sleep of East and West

Once on a horsehair mattress two feet thick
I woke up singing
as in the apocryphal story of my birth
at Temple University hospital

On the mesa with the burrowing owls
on the mesa with the prairie dogs

Willing to be lucky
I ran the perimeter road in my sleep
entrained to the cycles of light and dark
Sometimes my dead sister visited my dreams

Once on the beach in New Jersey
after the turtles deposited their eggs
before my parents grew old, nocturnal

The Poconos

My mother joined
the Leni-Lenape

when Pennsylvania Power and Light
dammed

Lake Wallenpaupack
and she turned

eight. In Philadelphia
Bubbie sewed name tags

into underwear and chose
Camp Pine Forest

for its strict counselors
and Friday night corn roasts.

My mother and her sister rose
high into the Poconos,

past waterfalls and rivers
where the eldest

became an Iroquois
among unruly bunkmates,

raiding the Shawnee
and short-sheeting the Minisink.

My mother fished
peaceably for perch and shad

with the other Leni-Lenape
and pursued the arts

and crafts of clay, wood.
She gave her birch bark box

in friendship
and taught the Seneca to build

a gabled frame from saplings.
For seven summers

she portaged and rowed,
roaming the woods with her clan,

and in time,
after Color War,

the tribe made her a Pine Tree---
and she sat at tribal council,

where she presided
over her children,

distinguished
by her compassionate nature,

bartering her freedom
for a modest home on a small tract of land.

Against Pleasure

Worry stole the kayaks and soured the milk.
Now, it’s jellyfish for the rest of the summer
and the ozone layer full of holes.
Worry beats me to the phone.
Worry beats me to the kitchen
and all the food is sorry. Worry calcifies
my ears against music; it stoppers my nose
against barbecue. All films end badly.
Paintings taunt with their smug convictions.
In the dark, Worry wraps her long legs
around me, promises to be mine forever.

Thugs hijacked all the good parking spaces.
There’s never a good time for lunch.
And why, my mother asks, must you track
beach sand into the apartment?
No, don’t bother with books,
not reading much these days.
And who wants to walk the boardwalk anyway,
with scam artists who steal your home and savings?
Watch out for talk that sounds too good to be true.
You, she says pointing at me,
don’t worry so much.

Man of the Year

My father tells the story of his life

and he repeats The most important thing:
            to love your work.
I always loved my work.  I was a lucky man.

This man who makes up half of who I am,
            this blusterer
who tricked the rich, outsmarting smarter men,

gave up his Army life insurance plan
            (not thinking of the future
wife and kids) and brokered deals with two-faced

rats who disappeared his cash but later overpaid
             for building sites.
In every tale my father plays outlaw, a Robin Hood

for whom I’m named, a type of yeoman
        refused admission
into certain clubs. For years he joined no guild ---

no Drapers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant
        Tailors, Salters, Vintners---
but lived on prescience and cleverness.

He was the self-inventing Polish immigrant’s
        son, transformed
by American tools into Errol Flynn.

As he speaks, I remember the phone calls
        during meals---
an old woman dead in apartment two-twelve

or burst pipes and water flooding rooms.
         Hatless,
he left the house and my mother’s face

assumed the permanent worry she wore,
        forced to watch him
gamble the future of the semi-detached house,

our college funds, and his weekly payroll.
        Manorial halls
of  Philadelphia his Nottingham,

my father fashioned his fraternity
        without patronage
or royal charters but a mercantile

swagger, finding his Little John, Tinker,
        and Allen-a-Dale.
Wholesalers, retailers, in time they resembled

the men they set themselves against.
        Each year they roast and toast
one member, a remnant of the Grocer’s Feast

held on St. Anthony’s day, when brothers
        communed and dined
on swan, capon, partridges and wine.

They commission a coat of arms, a song,
        and honor my father---
exemplary, self-made, without debt---

as Man of the Year, a title he reveres
        for the distinguished
peerage he joins, the lineage of merry men.
 

© All Copyright, Robin Becker.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.