Love, when mingled with doubt, runs much quicker,
And despair rivals delight at each turn.
The sudden bled juices of early May
Add thrills to life. Such persuasive liquor,
When dried on the wick, primes it to burn.
Something tugs night up like a sheet from day.
Bacchus, with a six-pack, comes for Sibyl,
And the hermit misses the city’s strife.
We blank out one future each time we decide.
The fulcrum of time demands so little:
Only that we give some portion of life
To love, or surely we have already died.
Death balances love on scales; goes up, then
What raises it pulls it back down again.

Original appearance in Ducts.

Special thanks to Amy, for believing in this poem.

Publisher’s Announcement

Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert’s first book, Sixty Sonnets, contain memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate lives—failed novelists, forgotten literary critics, cruel husbands, puzzled historians, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, high school dropouts, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems (“My love, we know how species run extinct”), satires (“The way of the human variety, / Not even happy just being happy”), elegies (The cold edge of the world closed on you, kissed / You shut”), and songs of sorrow (“Seasons start slowly. They end that way too”). The original rhyme scheme devised for this sequence—ABCABCDEFDEFGG—allows the author to dust off of the Italian “little song” and Americanize the Elizabethan love poem for the twenty-first century. Speaking at times in propria persona (“We’ll head out, you and me, have a pint”), at times in the voice of both male and female characters (“I’m sorry I left you that day at MoMA”), at times across historical gulfs (“Caesar and Charlemagne, Curie, Capone”), Sixty Sonnets marshals both trivia and tragedy to tell stories of modern America, at last achieving a hard-won sense of careful optimism, observing “the last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.”