Joshua Robbins has new work recently published or forthcoming in Third Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Fourteen Hills, New South, Copper Nickel, Southern Poetry Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. He has been awarded the James Wright Poetry Award and selected for inclusion in Best New Poets 2009. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he is a PhD student in English at the University of Tennessee, teaches poetry writing, and serves as Poetry Editor for the literary journal Grist.
Less Than Ash
Mid-summer’s sky peels back
above the turnpike. Another
August late-afternoon boilingover. I remember our
Hard Sunday pew, voices
singing Soon we’ll reachThe shining river, soon our pilgrimage
will cease. Even then, what
Was it I wanted? Not the river,its murmuring choir. But
Something, yes. Something pure
as this asphalt steam’s resurrectionOf all I’ve forgotten or have
tried to forget. Behind
The sanctuary as a boy, I listedand diagramed my sins. Striking
A match, I held the paper’s
flame and believed I neededNothing more, nothing less than
ash, the water to put it out.
After
I’m beginning now
to hear the voice that singsJust beyond memory: heaven-flung
and not quite an afterthought,Something settling on what
shifts in the heart. ButHere is no ghost, no
elegy, no wavering AmenTo be found in a hymn’s last line
like the one I sang off keyTo no one in particular, pulling
the soiled mattress out ofThe bedroom where my father
died, tipping it overThe balcony railing onto the grass
below. No one elseTo do it. Whatever my lot,
Thou has taught me to say....
Swing Low
This morning, more news of the same:
planes. Body counts.Incendiary clouds. A city burned alive as it slept.
So how can one not envy the juncos’easy devotion to sky? Their frivolous praise
indifferent to rush hour’s stop-and-go,though surely nothing’s coming for to carry
us home now. But what can I sayof war? The Southern clouds
roll in with their sweaty air, the sunrises rust-tinged, and I go on watching
a few drab birds flit for seedin the spray of sprinklers switching on,
while somewhere the dead gatherlike cloud shadows over a streets’
parked cars and shop awnings beforemoving on, dragging behind them
the pale flags of their wings.