A Poem by Ernest Hilbert

Under the Equinox

Are you a good boy? Are you gonna die good?
The man thrusts a supermarket trolley
Down the street. He stops to look at me.
I wonder if he thinks he knows me, if I should

Turn my eyes away, move off. His cart
Is stacked with obsolete computer shells,
Black rectangles assembled like a puzzle,
An angled space for each discarded part;

In tow, a slobbery mastiff on a rope,
Stopping to sniff at the sidewalk for piss, then
Catching up to the cart, stopping to smell again,
Then aim toward me with a menacing lope;

And, perched atop the cart, the fierce, black bird,
A rooster, its sickles spread to pirate sail,
Ruffling its lustrous obsidian tail
As if to dispute the entire world.

He lifts the rooster, sets it on his hat.
It puffs, poised to survey the street, a plume
Of imperial headdress, royal bloom
Of black. They stare. Then, I realize that

He can’t really see me at all. He’s blind.
Are you a good boy? Are you gonna die good?
He squats to tell the dog, Yes, boy, you’re good—
He gently lowers the bird, fatherly, kind.

With bird and dog and cart, he steps so close
We nearly touch. The rooster’s black feathers
Flash. Rusty wheels creak by. The tether’s
Tugged, and he moves away, with all he knows.

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