Ernest Hilbert

Clippings

Pitch Meeting for Dillinger Escape Plan Part Two

I hope to make a gangster film about

The making of a gangster film about

Some G-Men gunning down John Dillinger

As he emerges from a theater,

Where he had seen—true story, too—a movie

About a gangster’s life, as if to prove he

Was a hero, really. And what were these

Big-time mobsters doing in the film? Well, these

Guys were, you know, I shouldn’t have to say,

And I don’t have to tell you this, but they

Were watching—yes—a gangster movie too.

And in that movie they were watching one too.

And what were those guys doing? Oh, forget it.

I know you know, and I know. You get it.

With a click, the toenail, nicked off,

Flicks into the sink: like a Lateen sail

Flashing in sun above a caravel,

Cedar beams below sealed with pine sap,

The canvas stretched taut on its ropes

With late summer Ligurian winds,

Rinsed round the porcelain basin

Until the whirlpool spins it down

Into the MOEN stainless-steel drain,

A frothing pit that turns at world’s edge,

Beyond the final, smoking gates—

Farewell the roofs of gold, torch-lit

Chantries, bustling quaysides,

The sun itself—from there a voyage

To the slow green orca forest

Undersea, to steaming caverns

Where heroes wait, half in dream,

For any news from the world above. 

Ernest Hilbert is the author of the poetry collections Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—and Last One Out. His fifth book, Storm Swimmer, was selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize and appeared in 2023. He lives in Philadelphia where he works as a rare book dealer. He has written about books for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hopkins Review. His poem “Mars Ultor” was included in Best American Poetry, and his poems appear in Yale Review, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Harvard Review, Arion, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, Boston Review, The New Republic, American Scholar, and the London Review. In 2023 he was awarded the Meringoff Writing Award for Poetry from the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. Visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com.