To Play A Tune (Love Poem) Poem by Doren Robbins

A fountain remains
the only durable object from those
two years of night-shifts, drunk nights,
nightmares in single rooms. Two years,
a continuous descent
to a source of myself that I couldn't
define. Almost everything was closed-off.
And I really thought it was all leading
to a source like that of the waves
where the quick water feeds
from the pollen
of melted snow.
I would come and sit in the garden
below tall flames of the unfallen maple
and watch the leaves blurred with dusk
in the shallow fountain shell.
And the night-shifts, the drunk nights,
nightmares in single rooms, the sirens,
the renewed leaves that depressed me―
everything― dissolved in that water.
I passed those years like some unborn
cicada, ripening underground. I passed
those years wrapped in a thick larval blanket.
And the cicada that sometimes does not emerge
before seventeen years, the cicada rises
to play a tune on its drum
which is a marriage song to its mate.
Through the years, the false ripenings
and the real ones, the jobs, and the endless travels,
I have risen like that toward one woman,
she is my pollen of melted snow,
my tall unfallen flame.
But from the other time― a fountain remains
the only durable thing, the only thing
that had no desire
to exceed or decrease
the small music that it made,
the only thing connected
to its source