"Poem Begun on the Autumn Equinox" by Ernest Hilbert

“Poem Begun on the Autumn Equinox” by Ernest Hilbert

by Ernie on 17/08/10 at 9:59 am

The graveyard is as orderly and clean
As the playing fields and ballpark nearby.
I park the jeep midway between the two.
I wonder what this short distance can mean.
Partly gone from all that appears early,
At thirty-five I’m at least half way through.
One wine-red leaf sinks through the humid air.
At its end, summer still feels like itself.
Seasons start slowly. They end that way too:
One more check, one more payment, one less hair.
One may still add grains of learning and wealth,
But the mornings that remain seem too few.
There’s nothing to hear on the radio.
The river is low, foams white, and runs slow.

Original appearance in American Poetry Review.

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.”