Ernest Hilbert
She Abides with Me Still

Her tongue bristles, starred with microbes.
Eyelashes swarm with invisible locusts,

Her throat glazed with aquatic colonies,
Lush tiergartens dangling from her earlobes.

Her skin, once soft, dries and powders to dust,
Stirs into tornado with the smallest breeze

Around the Gibraltar of a bread crumb
Or Carthaginian elephant of a pincered mite.

Her eyeball is an oceanic globe.
It observes black mold behind the bottom

Bookshelves in the basement. Moths halo the light
After gnawing wool all winter in the wardrobe.

Viaducts of spider silk and confections of cat hair
Are knots of highway, archways of solar flare.

She too is of a teeming empire that clings
Luckily to the surface of a rare orb,

Circling a sun that circles other suns
Like spiraled pinworms or Saturn’s royal rings,

Solar systems a sponge could absorb,
Racecourses on which a gas giant runs,

Galaxies hauled by other galaxies,
Endless systems all as anonymous

As she is now. We’re aimless, undying in the dawn
As if we’re trapped under frozen seas,

Poltergeists of angel and octopus,
Ectoplasms ninety earths long and then gone.

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #8: Winter 2019, Volume 4 Number 2