'Knowing Only What Is Shown, Nothing Learned'

In Wednesday’s installment of his newsletter “Prufrock,” Micah Mattix praises the American poet Ernest Hilbert’s “understated realism”  -- as opposed to hyperbolic fantasy, I suppose. There’s a sobriety to Hilbert’s work, a mature acceptance of the real world unaccompanied by carping or utopianizing. Not that he’s humorless but his wit is muted and he doesn’t usually play for laughs. Hilbert is a young man (fifty-three) with a thoughtful older man’s sensibility. Take “On Leaving an Old Mirror Out at the Curb” (2015): 

“What do I call you at the end? Witness,

Mimic, tyrant of the departed years,

At times flatterer; others still-life, ghost,

Pure pool, twin, ludicrous door, or clearness

Leading nowhere, yet alluring as a frontier,

Great eye, roommate, spy—ominous, silent host.

Despite all you’ve witnessed and returned,

You recall nothing in your absolute present,

Silent movie, brittle glass bed, leaning gurney,

Knowing only what is shown, nothing learned,

What occurs but never what it has meant,

Will be, or was. Forgive this last journey

Into the earth, where you’ll be bent and crack,

Where you’ll shatter but be serene as stone,

Free from vanities that bathe the bone,

Razors of cold light lodged blindly in black.”

 

Hilbert’s subject is the seductive deceptiveness of mirrors, the narcissist’s best friend, nemesis of the diffident. Outside the church at our corner, leaning against a pile of discarded furniture and lumber by the street, was a large mirror in a wooden frame. What I saw first as I turned at the corner was not a mirror but a misplaced segment of sky and tree, and I felt a momentary fit of vertigo. Mirrors are metaphysical traps, as Nabokov suggests in the first chapter of his final Russian-language novel, The Gift (1937; trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Michael Scammel, 1963). Fyodor Konstantinovitch Cherdyntsev is moving into a boarding house in Berlin:

 

“As he crossed towards the pharmacy at the corner he involuntarily turned his head because of a burst of light that had ricocheted from his temple, and saw, with that quick smile with which we greet a rainbow or a rose, a blindingly white parallelogram of sky being unloaded from the van--a dresser with mirror across which, as across a cinema screen passed a flawlessly clear reflection of boughs sliding and swaying, not arboreally, but with human vacillation, produced by the nature of those who were carrying the sky, these boughs, this gliding façade.”

 

Mirrors are frequent props in Borges’ poems and stories. In “Mirrors” he writes:

 

“Everything happens, nothing is remembered

in those dimensioned cabinets of glass

in which, like rabbits in fantastic stories,

we read the lines of text from right to left.”

 

As Hilbert puts it, addressing the mirror: “Despite all you’ve witnessed and returned, / You recall nothing in your absolute present . . .”