Unleashed, we sped hard through the sunset rush,
To the west, still fierce like stung animals,
Blood honeyed, making for the dusty sun,
Our future seething to a raw gorgeous crush.
Flaming cloud-runs slowly thawed like candles
On the sad, unattainable horizon.
You'd been shot three times, soaked with tar and sweat,
But you gunned the grimy frame toward night,
Lit a smoke and cringed at the oily guts
Leaking from your side. You could never let
Them win. You winced and gripped my small wrist tight,
As we lurched off the road into dirt ruts,
Launched out to tether's end, high from the pain,
The past dragging and chiming like a chain.

The Fugitive Spends Christmas in a Las Cruces Motel Room

Stale tamales for breakfast with pale tea,
Cool daybreak fires over the bronzed valley.
Grizzled pink tatters down the jet-flaked blue.
The cruel moon curves and makes chaos of the sea,
Sways around again to drag night from me.
Time has ground me sharp, but I know I'm through.
He's in a mound of stones and chaparral.
We didn't get much cash. It's nearly gone.
Life is gathered closer here, and death too.
I'm sad, and I have no one left to call.
I peek through blinds, sit on the bed alone.
These kind blue pills burn me up and make me new.
I'm wasted and true, savage, coarse, and far.
Winter smoothes me away like an old scar.

Ernest Hilbert is the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review. He was educated at Oxford University, where he was the editor of the Oxford Quarterly. He later became the poetry editor for Random House’s magazine Bold Type in New York and edited the magazine nowCulture for several years. He works as an antiquarian book dealer and lives in Philadelphia with his fiancée, an archaeologist. His poems have appeared in the New Republic, the New Criterion, and the American Scholar.




 

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  Ernest

  Hilbert