Ephemera
By 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.
Copyright Credit: Robin Becker, "Ephemera" from The Horse Fair: Poems, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Copyright © 2000 by Robin Becker. Reprinted by permission of Robin Becker.
Source: The Horse Fair: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000)