ernest hilbert
For Winn Coslick
It’s boiling up: my tin-ceilinged cavern
Downtown. I’m struggling to play a record,
But my fingers quiver and the needle
Shrieks like scraped chalk through the speakers. I turn
It up, and up, and up. I’m lit, like a war,
With pills, lines, so many drinks I can’t feel.
I find two women shooting heroin
In my bed. I’m coming up so hard I puke.
Oh Christ the summer is stunned with lilacs!
Someone gets kicked in the nose, and then
More arrive, and more, and would you look
At all this, and God the noise, we can’t go back—
We fall apart like ancient stars, sparks,
Gold—like pollen blown across all this dark.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
ernest hilbert - nights of 1998
ernest hilbert’s
debut collection is Sixty Sonnets. Hilbert’s poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, Verse, New Criterion, American Scholar, and the London Review. He attended Oxford University, where he edited the Oxford Quarterly. He was the poetry editor for Random House’s magazine Bold Type in New York City (1998-2003) and, more recently, of the Contemporary Poetry Review (2005-2010). He hosts the popular blog and video show www.everseradio.com. He is an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist.
