Four Sketches for Characters in Landscapes

Ernest Hilbert

i. The Scholar Stands Before the Mosaic of Aeneas at the Bardo in Tunis

Such ways as those lost in endless verses
Are here reconquered and vivid with heat,
The ceaseless broken days borrowed

And translated, fading chips glued into mosaics.
The ancient turquoise fish curve, enclosing
Aeneas’s blank simper and sea-tangled hair.

The breakers slither in, dousing trouser-cuffs in camel dung and seaweed,
Fossilized, these epics, and the fastening of
Flame into prismatic tranquility,

Motes of color like pixels composing a map:
“Even the single memory of a lost passion
Remains for centuries until we perceive it,”

As if to verge, to engage, were merely a parody
Of that love that first joined us; though these debts
Are unlikely to be redressed or m[e]et with rhyme in this age.

As one is implausibly upheld by serenity
In the last moments before commerce is cut
From oasis to coast, sky ensnared below the waters,

The wells poisoned, crops salted over,
Sky-silver brine seared on Saharan rock,
That which is raised from us, leaving us fierce and unmade.

ii. The Countess Stands Before the Remaining Headstones of the Vicarage in Cornwall

What honor is displaced
In the treatment of these remains?
Those formerly favored with lordship,

Chevaliers and harsh rulers who watched
Once over these drizzling hills and were gone
Now face a surge of Atlantic depth,

Soapy fall of sea’s saliva
Over exposed tombs, wearing
At the coast where ruins were

Long hemmed in by custodial soil—
Encased beneath the heft and thrum of bells—
Caskets rinsed clean and claimed by waves.

“I pace out the boundary-lines of my own realm,
That rainy domain that formed me and within which I suffer,”
Where the ancient halls declined,

Where cracked armor and beaten gold
Were crammed into the sad earth,
Interred and released, those of our kind,

We are told, inelegant
And departed from complaint,
Relinquished with savagery into the world again.

iii. The Architect Arrives for the Summer in Greece

The coffee is steaming sweet silt in the white cup.
Gold plates gleam in the noon through dust
Off the square. Behind the baths is

An excavated garden, scorched to stone
By centuries, five skeletal trees
Caged in a bleached peristyle.

Leda, Diana, Ganymede— 
“These thoughts I carry with me, ashy remembrance
Of one believed inviolable and cruel”—

And so, though it is impossible to render solace
To one who is gone, one might still shoulder it
For another day, some other role.

iv. The Journalist Embarks for Cyprus

The great anchor at the rusted bow rests against the
Wind like a giant vertebra deposited by years of decay;
He crouches beneath it sipping a Heineken and covering his face

From the cool spray that rushes up with the sunset.
In the darkness that follows, the islands are visible
Only as clusters of light marking villages

And then nothing. These terrestrial 
Stars to which we incline, on which we rely, against
Whose sparse light we navigate these waters,

Are themselves like anchors, affixed
To some great motion, hammering their
Luster into the heavy seafloor of the night.