Poetry / Joshua Robbins
:: In the Dark Heaven of an Hour ::
What if we can do no better
than this: on our own
and the only witnesses to the gravel
and weeds we are meant to become,
but, for now,
ignore,
listening instead
for the world to play the infinite
song of its last breath
as space
gathers like the crowd
at the edge
of police strobes
and caution tape
where the mini-mart sign’s buzz-glow
casts the assemblers’ shifting shadows
onto hot asphalt
and moon-washed oil slicks
uniform in their stillness
after the first good rain in months has receded
just as soon as it fell,
just as the body
of the late-shift cashier inside the store
fell out of dream
hearing the entrance bell’s
double-chime
like the declamatory end rhyme
of an unfinished poem
penned in his notebook’s margins
before dozing off,
as if he knew the night
could not do
without us
reflected hours later
in the doors’ glass we stared through
as though through
our own sleep
broken by gunshots
at the end of our street
lined with oblivious crepe myrtles
devoted, in a way
I cannot understand,
to this world,
which no pale god watches
tumble through the universe
as he rocks on his heels somewhere
in the dark
heaven of an hour
before bed and too late
to do anything
to stop
the thief in the night who pulls
his trigger twice and puts
one in the gut and one
in the chest
of the man
on the other side of the counter,
who might have told us how
we are more
than fragmented ruins or shards
of the ordinary
things one gives one’s life to
and which were already gone for him
that moment he looked up and out
and past
this world that kills
as calmly and deliberately
as a perfect final couplet might
if we could read it
now or after we’ve all
had a drink or a smoke on the porch
to calm the nerves, we’d say,
before morning yields
to the traffic’s groans,
as we shield our eyes
and drive off
toward nowhere.
From the writer
:: Account ::
This poem is an elegy for a young man working the late-night cashier shift at a neighborhood convenience store near our house. He was shot and killed in a robbery. Even as I call this poem an elegy, I do wonder if I throw the term around too loosely here. Perhaps I like to think the contemporary elegy has transcended the standards of the Romantics and Victorians and even the rebellious Modernists? Or perhaps even today’s elegy cannot escape the trappings of the elegiac tradition, Freudian substitution and compensatory return, a laying on of flowers, etc. But how to write an elegy in this case, in this moment, that does not abstract the subject of the poem for the sake of amplifying or illuminating some so-called “truth” only deliverable by the speaker or poet? I’ve tried to write an elegy that isn’t concerned with what’s true or comforting as much as it is with assimilating grief into the reality of the moment rather than into solace and understanding. Shades of Levis here, but the tragically murdered kid, who I did not know, was not put on this earth to be an example of something else in my elegy. And so I am trying to put the factness of the kid behind the counter before you, so you won’t mistake him for anything else, this kid needlessly dead, because it is only by making the poem assimilate into its realities of its moment—police tape, rain, poverty and violence, suburbia, religious doubt—that any space to imagine his death in the abstract is removed. And then, afterwards, perhaps, it is possible to move from the poem to a consideration of the socio-political actualities we must resist.
Joshua Robbins is the author of Praise Nothing (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), part of the Miller Williams Series in Poetry, and Eschatology in Crayon Wax (Texas Review Press, 2024). His recognitions include, among others, the James Wright Poetry Award, the New South Prize, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches creative writing at the University of the Incarnate Word and lives in San Antonio.