POETRY BY ERNEST HILBERT

Ernest Hilbert lives in Philadelphia where he works as a rare book dealer. He is the author of the poetry collections Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—and Last One Out. His fifth book, Storm Swimmer, was selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize and appeared in 2023.
He wrote the introduction to the 2015 Classic Tales of Horror from Canterbury Classics. He has also written about books for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hopkins Review. His poem “Mars Ultor” was included in Best American Poetry, and his poems appear in Yale Review, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Harvard Review, Arion, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, Boston Review, The New Republic, American Scholar, and the London Review. In 2023 he was awarded the Meringoff Writing Award for Poetry from the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.
You can visit his author site here:
https://www.ernesthilbert.com/
SPECIMEN
The dreams are softened cysts, swollen polyps
Afloat in jars of preserving alcohol
Along the wall of the hidden basement lab,
Sealed up ever since its owner passed away.
Prisms fan slowly inside the jars as the sun
Slants down, a myth in dusty winter glass.
No one remembers what happened to the key.
It’s likely buried with the woman who
Once owned the place. Inside the cloudy jars,
Twitches, stirrings in dwindled liquid,
Small sounds that must be only echoes,
Taps and soft scratches at the glass,
So much unseen, and ice-packed windowpanes,
Where sun through spider-webs once warmed the jars,
Now muffled like the wind that moves the snow.
AirBNB
It looked okay online, but nothing like the place
I found when I arrived that week to find
Some keys dangling from the rusty lock out back.
Something’s wrong with the house; I don’t know what:
Its angles, mildews, spidery cracked glass,
The way it holds or pushes off the sunlight
That steals through heavy pines that brush
The eaves in the wind. I found it hard to sleep,
More so when a storm arrived, a rising
And sinking rush, so much like waves, releasing
Needles and twigs to tick on the roof.
After the storm dragged its way up the coast,
A silence rested deeply with hints of things
Stirring in humid corners of other rooms.
A rich stink of mulch fingered its way down
From attic crawlspaces above my pillow.
The shadows gathered closely to the bed
As if to snuff the tiny reading lamp.
Worse, a portrait of a Confederate
Lieutenant leaned askew on the mantle.
The painting captured something I found weird:
A smile, almost glib. Did I see it right?
It’s nearly imperceptible, the curl
Of the lip, as if he’d recalled a joke,
Despite an air of overwhelming despair.
He seemed so tired. He must have been sixty
When he squeezed into his old uniform
To pose for the painter. It must have been
The last days of McKinley’s presidency.
Yes, it was there, that smile, if that’s what it was,
As if mocking me all these decades down.
Those rooms must surely comfort many ghosts
Who find themselves with nowhere else to go,
As if it were some hidden summer retreat
Of an unremembered royal line, heirs
Of a failing empire overturned at last.
I’ll never go there again. Just awful.
The owners failed to return a single call.
Flies swarmed the kitchen. Lights clicked on and off.
Still, a week later, back at home, I find
Myself pulled to see it again. I locate
The town on Google Earth, wheeling over
Byways and meadows with my barbed cursor,
Slipping up the serrated coast, searching
For the street in the tiny town, hoping to find
The house itself, or where it should have been.
I count the homes on the street, firehouse
On the corner, the roadside vegetable stand,
All the things I saw from the grimed-up windows
Of that place, but the house isn’t there. Nothing,
Not even a record of that address.
The lot is vacant; pines edge an empty square.
|