Ernest Hilbert

I listened to Bach for eight hours
After she left into the snow,

Disappointed with my library
...

On a step behind the Holiday Inn,
Two Russians roamed up, bummed a cigarette,
While a third snuck up, struck me from behind.
I sprawled to asphalt. Then the boot came in.
...

I’m battered all to hell. You should see me.
I’m in the corner of a bright diner,
The very one from Suzanne Vega’s song.
Every time I limp to the john to pee
...

An aristocratic Dane, draped in tweed, blonde hair whisked to side, clunked a bottle of whiskey down on the desk, waved his hand easily into the smoky air as if shooing a desert fly: “This is so vulgar. It really is, ” meaning the Brahms Festival Overture, and the light for one small moment over the library glinted into the window.

“The ocean will never cease to give us pleasure, Doctor.” She posed on wet rocks against a distant storm; he stood beside a yawl overturned beneath the seawall and complained: “My friends, they either disappoint me or compel me to jealousy.”
...

Shrine of lunar hulls
Swayed to mist in river’s hold
Or solar reservoir dried
To yolk and pollen,
...

All that was shaped will be sunk clear of chance,
And all printed given out to be sung.

Felon, old friend, death will not travel long.
...

Fuzz-head & coconut-gun stumbled on the hard wet sand
Humid boardwalk haze and grey choke-mist reruns in Little Odessa

Brighton Beach
...

He arrived in the city and before long it began to snow.
The smell of spices and meats fried in oils
Filled the cold. Tire-grey drifts glutted the streets.
Snow flurried like thick wet motes of ash.
...

Smiling sadly with beer beneath canopy
Of canaried gold and song, so much cold wind
Gone out into dark cove of oar and sail,
...

It is September, and I lunch in rain.
I do not like your city. I do not

Welcome the filling sky as I once could.
...

Bosch’s demons, roosting against
The luminous sky of the Low Countries,
Emerge shaped of stone or dirty light,
Perched atop the haywain blowing
...

Fixed light overhead
Delivered to chiseled distance

Of steeple and rigged mast,
...

My friends quietly dropped out of high school.
It seemed each week we had parties for some guy
Going into jail or getting released.
It’s not that anyone thought this was cool,
...

What natural or man-made wonders will we
Prospect in those crevasses and gullies,
Boulders blotted blue as soggy lilacs
With lichen and cloud shadow? It’s all free:
...

For some, ardent reading forms its own end,
A drawn-out, lonely, unpaid profession.
Even as pastime, it’s viewed as creepy.
The mind greets ghosts, and no good to pretend
...

When it comes to love and peace, that’s it,
We will never really learn to grow up.
Tantrums scorch; jealous, hurtful flares bear light
In the darkness we fashion from splendid
...

It happens to us all, at least one time,
The black, caught knot of storm threatens, distant,
But buckling closer, waves capped and blown white.
Heavy tides, laden with fresh wreckage, climb,
...

My love, we know how species run extinct,
And greenest plants grow to fossils in time,
Mountains go molten and run to the sea,
That our careful ideas, all we think,
...

A young Napoleon, his hair coursed back, ferine,
Was already, as a lieutenant in the King’s artillery,
Expert in ramrod and shot. Being of lower nobility,
And Corsican into the deal, he considered
...

To pass the time we played backgammon with
Husks of carved whalebone on a smooth steel board.
I always seemed to win, though I knew you
Cheated. We had spent the past weeks in a warehouse
...