Ernest Hilbert Reads “Two Portraits” from Aim Your Arrows at the Sun
by Ernie on 08/03/10 at 9:31 am
Love Among the Ruins, or LATR, is a small press named after the unfinished Evelyn Waugh novel and based in New York City. It was founded in Summer 2009 by editors Daniel Lin and Margaret Monaghan.
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“Two Portraits” by Ernest Hilbert
Two portraits lean on their stands and watch me.
One frame, of cheap rusted metal, now cocked,
Holds a fading black and white photograph
Of my father, raising me, a small boy
Before a piano and a long board
Chalked with staves: old melodies and high notes,
A wall of trills and delicate runes like
The antechamber of an ancient tomb.
The notes run up and up from left to right
Disappearing behind the great bear-form
Of my bearded father in striped tie and tweed.
He cups his big hands beneath my small legs.
Through his shadowed glasses—I can scarcely
Meet his eyes—he watches me at my work.
The other frame, stained dark cherry, nicked pink
At its edges, clasps Dürer’s engraving,
“St. Jerome in his Study.” The bearded saint,
Bald and intent, gazes down on his own work,
Never aware of me, as a dog and
Human-faced lion doze beside his slippers.
Light breaks from his pate like a borealis,
Serene as the light through his window.
On rainy mornings, I sit at my desk
Above the quiet street and look into
The frames, into their submerged pools that swim
In reflected light as if rippled under
Clear water, near enough, almost, to touch.
The Dürer is like a royal tomb filled
With sparks and traces of an imagined world.
Its coppery scintilla comfort me.
The other shines like his coffin, set on end,
In time slowly dimming, becoming flat,
Still empty of its intended occupant.
