On the evening of Wednesday, January 29th, 2025, Ernest Hilbert read two poems from his work in progress, High Ashes, “Horned God” and “Whitethorn, or the Pit and What They Found There,” upstairs at Fergie’s Pub in Philadelphia. The poems appeared in the magazine Arion, Fall 2024, Third Series, 32.2, published by the Center for Classical Studies at Boston University. This is the first time poems from the book were performed in public.

You may stream the live recording below. You will hear the burbling din of the drinkers downstairs at the bar and, now and again, the squeak of the prehistoric dumbwaiter as trays of food are yanked up from the kitchens below. These distractions are minor and in no way unusual in recordings of a live public performance.

Many thanks to those who came out as well as those who streamed from afar and wrote to me so kindly about the performance.

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Horned God


A book about Pierre Bonnard 
Across my lap an hour, then back 
To Caesar’s Gallic Wars again.
Your deck has lost the single card
That tells my fate: a key I lack,
A fortress hidden in a fen. 

The Schubert serenade concludes.
Our tabby nonchalantly grooms 
His coat, a terminal moraine. 
The windows fill with tortured moods
Of light to haunt these lonely rooms.
It nears. Outside the sirens reign,

And soon we’ll have the next eclipse. 
It’s in the news. It’s all around. 
And so we go out on the lawn.
Upstairs the rusted faucet drips.
The figure comes to claim its crown
Of holly in an unreal dawn. 

The tide engorges miles of marsh. 
The horns begin. The barges burn. 
Facades come down. New icons rise. 
There’s no way out. The flash is harsh.
The moon aligns at last to turn
The sun to horns. We shield our eyes. 

* * *

Whitethorn, Or the Pit and What They Found There


My iPhone 25 is locked. The drones 
Whir overhead all day to map the dig.
I do no work. I’m here alone among 
The busy, dusty crew, who joke and talk. 
They set up screens to block the violent sun. 
They never mention the hall, just the pit,
As if the walls aren’t there, or can’t be seen. 
Perhaps it’s been explored and bores them now. 
A darkness rises, cold, in me. And you.
You didn’t come, and so I write to you. 
The birdsong here is intricate and bleak.

Last night’s hard rain is held in reservoirs 
High in the hornbeam’s leaves. The sky is clear,
But cold winds blow and hiss fresh showers loose. 
The grass is dark, a heavy gloom in green. 
This page: an unplowed field, a forest yet 
Uncut, a cloud of silver fish uncaught.
And thus begins the lonely, delving pain 
That beckons into being another book.

I know I have no role to play. The ones
Who do abhor my presence at the dig.
I own the land, allow its use. This place 
And the ghosts it holds are both a gift 
And a burden, come down through circuitous 
Channels: my cryptic, sole inheritance. 
Do I possess this ruin or do I 
Belong to it? Will I rebuild or tear 
It down and start the story over now? 

The first night’s dreams were bad. I wrote them down. 
What spirit took the pencil in my hand,
And gripped too tight, until my knuckles ached?
I write to still the fear. Am I at fault
Or is it some ancestral pain that drives me
To seek myself in remnants of the past?
The clear absurdity: to make a thing 
And think by that I might deny the void, 
My book a bulwark placed against the chill 
And dragging tide of nothingness, one more 
Cold flint, unstruck, to cast toward a sea 
That rises never to recede, a flowered 
And restless foam reworking the moonlight.

Slow pools of morning light lap side to side 
When wind annoys the aging trees at dawn.
I don’t know what I feel, exactly, save
An overwhelming sehnsucht, ruinenlust,
Desire packed hard in peat for what is lost. 
 
The mountains pass the mornings lost in mist. 
The excavation proceeds by inches
As stranger items reveal themselves to us—
A hematite mace head, an arc of harp,
A cracked, Sasanian facet-cut glass bowl,
Egyptian blue faience model of a fig,
A Swiss Lake Dwellings Neolithic axe,
A bullet-riddled Stuka’s fin corroded 
To spots and clouds like a leopard shark,
A silver siren, crowned and tentacled,
Mouth opened in alluring, silent song;
But also midden, chert, and coprolite,
Grave goods and ghost walls, an empty black urn.

I look away from what is buried there.
I write and write and write to you. Or me.
I hear the scrape of shovels and of sieves,
The clunking buckets, whispered brushes. 
These vaults of wonders yield no miracles.
The things they find don’t matter anyway.

And the ruins here that overlook the pit? 
What happened to those who ventured in before? 
They never spoke about the time inside. 
A thought cuts through: High Ashes might be real 
But you might not. Birds shriek at the dried brook.

And more, and more, to sunlight, washed and tagged—
Crescentic axehead, bronze from Luristan,
A speckled blue tilde of Canosan 
Terracotta dolphin drowned in dirt,
A necklace strung with prickly murex shells,
A granite block incised PRINCEPS CINIS,
A whalebone spade, a tarnished coat of mail. 
Now some are kept and sent to be displayed,
In private lit vitrine or museum hall,
And some tossed back and covered up again.

I dreamt we were consigned together to 
The pit, to suffer for eternity 
In one another’s arms and down there
Rot unrecorded. After all, what is 
This place? A hoax, hallucination?
We cannot choose what we inherit, but
You have chosen not to share it with me.

They found a stone sarcophagus was split
Apart (from within? I restrained myself 
From asking), a marble Oceanus, 
Windblown, proud and missing all his fingers.
Then cob, small stones, wet soil, water, and bone—
this last ground into grit, I overheard
one of them speculate, by bullocks’ hooves.

I wish you’d come. I’m in the new field house. 
I pull a blind aside and find a blue 
Moth, frantic, pinned between the dirty panes. 
The magic isn’t working anymore. 

It was a place I hoped would come to be 
Because we both believed in it at once, 
And only once. We shared a vision of 
A maze that made itself as we advanced. 

They pile fresh planks of pine to make a fire. 
They breathe the fragrant smoke and drink cool wine
As black as squid’s ink in the glare of flame 
That gutters and sparks and breathes out smoke
Until the wood’s used up, embers and ash. 

If you were here, we’d dream each night alone
But dream a place the other might as well,
Or just a lonely place we’d call our own.
The magic isn’t real, you say. It is. 
It’s in the making of the thing. It is 
The thing, the very thing just as it is.
The work—it never ends—to drag a world 
Into being, a place that doesn’t yet exist, 
A half-heard music, we add the missing parts,
A cache of bezoars, painted each with marks,
The fragile elfin light inside a glass 
Unguentarium that once held balms,
Or potions, perfumes, a Coptic linen panel,
A weft-loop pile that hints at two like us:
They stand and face each other, with hands raised 
In prayer or greeting or perhaps surrender.

Some members of the team are different week
To week. The young ones leave at weekends. Some
Return and others don’t, and new ones come
In kerchiefs, flip-flops, tank tops, cargo shorts.
They nod in time to music in their earbuds. 
The older ones remain, professors, tanned
With beards and ponytails, old sandals, jeans.
They rest at tables in the shade of oaks.
I sit alone and pour my gin on ice. 
I watch them, wonder why they chose this life? 
I hear them laugh but never catch the jokes.

They asked about a nearby mound they called
A tumulus. What did it hold? I told
Them they could dig there too. They broke the ground. 
In time they reached a darker, soggy soil.
They found the body of a man clutching 
His knees, his eyes clinched in migraine slits, 
The body black and glistening like tar, 
A yeast of centuries steaming in the sun,
Upon his head a circlet shaped as horns. 
He gripped a torc of gold in one hard fist. 
The other held a statue of himself,
Obsidian, erect with royal bearing,
A boundary around him formed from antlers 
Of ancient elk, and stags now long extinct, 
An arcing horn of ancient antelope, 
Unreadable fierce scroll of narwal tusk,
Two oars, three bowls, four shields, and at his crotch 
A rotted bag bursting with grain and coins
Each stamped with rulers no one recognizes. 
Was he a king or fool? Or both? His death 
Deserved or accident? Did those he knew
Decide to turn on him or try to save him?
Was this their home or just a station in
A long removal? Did they hunt or flee?
A yew tree, nearly dead, sends out its roots
To gore the torso, forcing through the ribs 
And stabbing through the heart, as fresh and red 
As earthworms blindly seeking nutrients.

Among those gathered in disgust and awe, 
I don’t know who, one said he looked like me, 
Or I like him, and then I turned, enraged 
Though holding in my pain with dignity, 
And off I stormed, alone and hurt, to hide 
Myself in shadows of waning afternoon 
Along the ruin, wondering what she meant, 
Or if it were a truthful observation,
Not rude at all. The crows are harsh today. 
The hawks just hang there haunting in the blue. 

I left and went away a week. When I 
Returned, the grave was filled completely in. 
Did they remove the man or leave him there? 
They’re good at finding ways to dodge me when
I ask. They act as if I’m not quite there. 

What started as a letter’s now a book.
The pit that’s grown so big now worries me,
A grassy maw athirst, aimed at the sky. 
There’s no way in and no way out or back. 
I tell them what I think. No search is worth 
The pain of finding out there’s nothing there.
The birds are making too much noise, not song, 
But threats and agitations, scratchy sounds, 
Panicky territorial warning signs, 
Their desperations so combative they
Evoke the whine of a man strapped down 
Straining insanely to get himself free. 
And how could I know? I do know. I was there.
The sun is strange right now but struggling through.
And it is real. The book is real. I sent it.
It’s this, the thing I made, and now it’s yours.

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