Ernest Hilbert’s poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, Harvard Review, Verse, New Criterion, and the The London Magazine . He attended Oxford University, where he edited the Oxford Quarterly. He has been poetry editor of Random House’s magazine, Bold Type, and the Contemporary Poetry Review. His poems have appeared in several anthologies, including the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets and two best-selling Penguin anthologies. His debut collection is Sixty Sonnets (Red Hen Press).
A clear sky over Kingsessing Avenue:
Iron gates catch a trove of wind-blown foil,
Crushed cupolas of Styrofoam,
Folded sails of wet newspaper.
Charles Addams, you strolled
These streets, observed the late sun
Burn and bulge in bay windows,
Sketched mansards on misty Sundays.
Would you have drawn me, peering
From behind blinds, edged by columns
Under a cornice jeweled with raindrops,
Scanning the shadowed street?
For Donald Hall
The raccoon is sinister, quick, silent,
With strange human hands and black mineral
Eyes that shine and seem to know me somehow.
She noses smoothly past feral cats
To get at the bowl of food we’ve left out.
Our own cats watch patiently through the screen.
Birds drop in swerving squadrons from branches.
In the house, at night, I wait for a ghost
To present itself in the creaking halls.
Trains groan low and vibrate across the meadow.
Refinery fires pulse on the river.
But no ghost, not yet. When I rise at night
For the bathroom, past the empty spare room,
I feel a girl’s fingers, faint as snow, on my wrist.
By the time you learned it was Lyme disease
It was “advanced.” The sports clinic sent you
Home with aspirin for an entire year.
With tuition due and an expired lease,
You sell your books. You’ve got debt, and flu,
So you make fewer classes, drink less beer,
Wait more tables, then, finally, sell your blood.
You skip your morning class but still can’t sleep.
Your so-called boyfriend won’t call back. What’s next?
If you can just finish the year . . . but the flood
Of bullshit continues, and you feel cheap.
You’re a week late. And then the dreaded text . . .
Your life piles up like wet laundry. It seems
Senseless, and what is that? Are those screams? Screams?
© 2011
Salt Publishing Limited