You can sit and wait. You can wait for it
In dusted corners. You can watch the street fill
With bright leaves, swing flash beams through the park,
Incited by worry to the end of your wits.
Or, again, you can simply sit, quite still.
It will feel as though you were sent into the dark
From an island where the sun baked rock and lured
Hurt light from the sea. Strange blossoms blow to
Earth like flakes of ash and you wait for news
From a stranger. Nothing helps. You wait for
A warm rain to pass, at last. You walk to
The trolley-stop, past all the flyers you
Taped up, damp now, smeared photo of the stray
On each scratched steel lamppost along the way.

Read on at Praxilla.

From the forthcoming collection All of You on the Good Earth (2013).

Publisher’s announcement:

Ernest Hilbert’s newest collection, All of You on the Good Earth, continues to explore the bizarre worlds of 21st-century America first glimpsed in his debut, Sixty Sonnets, which X.J. Kennedy hailed as “maybe the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America” and “whose dark harmonies and omnivorous intellect remind the reader of Robert Lowell’s,” according to Adam Kirsch. Critics have called Hilbert’s poems “at once ironic, dark, and witty,” containing the “full range of human types and stories, and nearly the whole breadth of what the sonnet can do,” “showy and spectacular,” “both seriously tough-minded and wryly self-chiding,” concluding that “the only other poet who plies risk against reward so deftly is Pound.” Poet and critic David Yezzi salutes Hilbert as “a twenty-first-century beatnik in Elizabethan ruff.”

At the end of the tumultuous year 1968, Apollo 8’s Commander Frank Borman described the earth-rise as sending “a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me.” He signed off: “Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.” All of You on the Good Earth guides the reader through chambers occupied by visionary gravediggers, spaced-out movie stars and pugnacious comic book characters come to life, frenzied dropouts, sullen pirates, and unrelenting stalkers, noble war correspondents and cornered dictators, unlucky drunks and supercilious scientists, impatient goddesses and sad sea monsters, zoned-out denizens of Plutonian strip-clubs and earnest haunters of ancient ruins, the infamous Rakewell in TriBeCa and sea nymph Kalypso in a beach house at the Jersey shore, characters wandering an America demoralized by economic decline. These poems contain fasts and feasts, laments and love songs, histories, fantasies, and elegies, the amusing and heartbreaking debris of life on this world, all the while recalling Seneca’s dictum, non est ad astra mollis e terris via (“the road from the earth to the stars is not easy”).

“Ernest Hilbert’s Sixty Sonnets is exactly what its title suggests—and thus it’s a performance as much as a book of poems, showy and spectacular. From the brisk noir of ‘She Remembers How They Fled from the Liquor Store Robbery in New Mexico’ to the ironic call-and-response of ‘Fortunate Ones’ to the elegiac fatalism of ‘White Noise’ Hilbert takes the reader on a bravura run through seemingly every variation of tone and style that the sonnet can contain. It’s a craftsman’s book, a revival of form best summed up by the opening lines of ‘Song’: ‘A song for those who learn forgotten, slow / Skills, crafts submerged long past by massed commerce.'” – Levi Stahl, poetry editor, Quarterly Conversation