October 23rd, 1898, Gloucester County

When I think back so far, light and shape blur,
As the sun-shot leaves above did for you,
Drowned, snug in muck, staring up to the world.
Just as the jokes and leaps on shore spurred
The picnic on, like life, history’s glue
Slung you to river bottom, caught and furled.
How long before they paused, and you were missed?
Did noon light waft through the slow green to you?
How long before they began to gather?
The cold edge of the world closed on you, kissed
You shut. To the first searchers, surfaces threw
Back mirrored sky, hid your tortured weather.
The fairgrounds, littered with bunting and trash,
Grew cold also. Great bonfires sank to ash.

Original appearance in Pleiades, Journal of New Writing.

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.”