Church Street

My friends quietly dropped out of high school.
It seemed each week we had parties for some guy
Going into jail or getting released.
It’s not that anyone thought this was cool,
Only good wishes that the time would fly,
And after twenty beers all his fears might cease.
Now that I look back, with no emotion,
We needed parties. We liked company.
We hardly needed a reason at all:
Never sweet-sixteen or graduation,
But funeral, fresh hitch in the army,
Baby soon for the sad girl in the hall.
We’d vent, catch any reason to not grieve,
Revel down days torn from the years we’d leave.

poem by Ernest Hilbert
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View of Dordrecht

Fixed light overhead
Delivered to chiseled distance

Of steeple and rigged mast,
Clocktower and mirrored wharf—

You held onto something
As music distant and calm—

Knowing there would soon be
Nothing left of light or any other—

Sent into far turning of inlet,
Mourned as a gift guarded and lost:

“There is nothing left of the night here, ”
He whispered as you parted,

Awed and jealous, desolate—
Distance exquisite as glisten in runnel

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poem by Ernest Hilbert
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Glass of Absinthe

No use pleading anymore at the dawn,
The waved-off world gone disastrous with time.

Decisions are uncomfortable
In this atmosphere. Valves drain, raise ballad—

Measures pound to flaked light, sun astride
Iron lace of railing on Royal Street—

Scrolled into oak leaves, acorns, sad long horns
In day shadows—urinal, late coffee.

They are restorations of ruined night,
But no beacon in our silver hours.

A life shaped by digressions: Linger long
Enough, and death itself loses the way to us.

She seems drunk but is not, her white skirt striped
With black from a fall on wet cobblestones.

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poem by Ernest Hilbert
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