Doren Robbins Poems

You're the one who saw us as two white starlings
in that weaving with two white birds in it
we brought back from Crete and hung
behind our bed. In your myth of white starlings
...

I’m watching the Anthony Perkins of Psycho.
My 1968 draft board.
I like the tide when it stays out, the sea has taken enough, I said.
Please explain, he said.
...

It all came down to a crane I saw
flow into blurring dusk and shallow water.
It didn't notice me stopped there a couple of
row-boat lengths away, chewing a Tuscany loaf,
...

Fulfillment is uncomfortable, fulfillment is uncontrollable.
What is it that Dylan Thomas told of a "weather's wind…"
"that through the green fuse drives the flower" drove
his green age-
...

I have spoken so long
and too much time
has been wasted
explaining so many
...

Below the poplar trees,
below the intricate swaying
sprays of mist, our child
not yet one year
...

A fountain remains
the only durable object from those
two years of night-shifts, drunk nights,
nightmares in single rooms. Two years,
...

I meant to ask her about a cup
we brought home from Greece.
Harvesters carrying long sheathes of wheat
in the carving that spreads from the handle,
...

Stephen was an ecstatic dancer until he was twenty-one and I wouldn’t go
to see him dying from AIDS.
I didn’t have what takes to be there to make a salutation
...

It was ninety degrees.
On and off someone coughed miserably in the next apartment.
We went through the whole bottle of wine, we were fed up
with our jobs and the summer. You pulled my hand
...