By Ernest Hilbert

The city is cat piss and dog shit. It stinks,
And the humid air molders. I lie in bed,
Too hot to move, slick with sweat, wait for dark.
Blue flies eddy over the cluttered sink.
I’m broke. The change dish is exhausted.
A Western Union stub is my bookmark.
You never knew me. You’re in a Victorian
Sea home, slicing, tasting a sweet cool peach,
As an ocean wind lifts your long light hair.
Your songs are old, your dresses European,
And your view is vast down the empty beach.
You pause, as long as you like on the stair.
Memories sink, and I am forced to bear
Life’s last thought: that you were never there.

---

Ernest Hilbert‘s poems have appeared in Fence, The New Republic, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, Verse, and the London Review. His debut collection is Sixty Sonnets. He is an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist.