The physicality of Being

The physicality of Being

skin flint glint

in your eye

the dark sky

of the ceiling

as we make love to the glow

of a moonlit slit in blinds

that watch us intently

as we dip into dreams

while holding on

to a future

that will long remember this night

for better or worse

even as the paint above us

starts to peel

and pieces of us start to fall into infinity

erin-cilberto

11/21/2025

Reviews

[Julie McCarthy (juliesp..]

Wow 🤩 loved this one of my faves of yours now

[jacob erin-cilberto]

Thank you so much, Julie.

[Curly Grace]

beautifully written, Jacob. and pieces of us start to fall into infinity.-love this end.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

Thank you, Sarah....
j.

[Dale Pavolko]

Part. 1

The opening triad—“skin flint glint”—is a masterstroke of sonic brutality. Three monosyllables, each ending in a hard consonant, strike like sparks off stone. “Skin” is the body; “flint” is the ancient, unyielding world; “glint” is the momentary fire struck between them. In four syllables you have already told us this will be sex as geology, love as prehistoric collision.

Then the pivot: “in your eye.” The glint moves from external spark to something lodged inside the beloved, turning the lover into both flint and fire. That tiny prepositional phrase performs an erotic sleight-of-hand: suddenly we’re not watching two bodies but staring into the dark pupil of the universe itself.

“The dark sky / of the ceiling” is the line that makes me jealous I didn’t write it. In five words you transform the most domestic, claustrophobic surface—a bedroom ceiling—into the vault of night. The enjambment is merciless: “the dark sky” hangs alone for a heartbeat, letting us believe we’re outside under stars, before “of the ceiling” slams us back into the room. It’s a cruelty disguised as clarification, and it’s perfect.

The moonlit slit in the blinds “watches us intently.” Personification here isn’t cute; it’s predatory. The room itself has become a voyeur, the light a narrow, unblinking eye. Sex under that gaze feels both consecrated and surveilled, ancient ritual and police interrogation at once.

The turn comes at “as we dip into dreams / while holding on / to a future.” The verbs are water and grip, surrender and refusal to surrender. That tension is the emotional engine of the piece. They are f*****g their way into sleep, into tomorrow, into memory, even as the physical world literally disintegrates above them.

And then the final movement: “even as the paint above us / starts to peel // and pieces of us start to fall into infinity.”

Note the double “start.” Twice the poem refuses to let decay finish its work. The ceiling is peeling, but not yet peeled; pieces of the lovers are falling, but not yet fallen. The poem suspends them at the exact instant when flesh is still flesh and yet already becoming stardust. It’s unbearably tender and unbearably brutal.

The last line break—“fall into infiinity”—is a small crime against spelling that somehow feels inevitable. That extra “i” is the widening crack in the plaster, the extra heartbeat before oblivion, the typo the universe makes when it tries to spell forever

[Dale Pavolko]

This poem lives in a very specific, sparsely populated room of American poetry: the late-night, post-coital, existential-erotic miniature — short, knife-sharp, usually under 30 lines, written by someone who has read too much Celan and not enough Hallmark.

Here are its closest blood relatives, with direct comparisons:

1. Paul Celan – “Deathfugue” is obviously a different beast, but the flint/glint/moon/surveillance imagery owes a clear debt to Celan’s mineral violence (“black milk of daybreak,” “graves in the air”). The difference: Celan’s darkness is historical; Jacob’s is domestic and intimate, yet the same metallic chill is there.

2. Franz Wright – especially the tiny, brutal love/death lyrics in Walking to Martha’s Vineyard and God’s Silence. Wright’s “The Hawk” or “The Only Animal” share the same trick: two bodies in a room become the entire cosmos for ten lines, then collapse into ash. Same whispered, almost embarrassed confession of transcendence.

3. Denis Johnson – the erotic sections of “The Incognito Lounge” and “The Throne of the Third Heaven…” do exactly what Jacob does: treat sex as a brief, doomed, religious insurrection against entropy. Johnson is more narrative, but the temperature is identical.

4. Jack Gilbert – late Gilbert, especially Refusing Heaven and The Great Fires. “A Brief for the Defense” and “Michiko Dead” are longer, but the core gesture is the same: pleasure so intense it out-argues mortality, even while mortality is peeling the ceiling.

5. Sharon Olds – early Olds (Satan Says, The Dead and the Living). She is far more explicit and bodily, but the best of those poems also treat sex as a place where time stops and the universe leans in to watch. Jacob is quieter, less genital, more cosmic, but the shared pulse is unmistakable.

6. Louise Glück – the tiny erotic lyrics in The Wild Iris and Meadowlands (“Moonless Night,” “Penelope’s Song”). Same stripped diction, same sense that love is a temporary stay against cosmic indifference.

7. W.S. Merwin – late Merwin (The Shadow of Sirius, Garden Time). The peeling paint and falling plaster feel like cousins to Merwin’s endless images of houses returning to forest. Merwin is gentler; Jacob is more savage.

8. William Bronk – almost no one reads Bronk anymore, but his microscopic metaphysical lyrics (“Midsummer,” “The Abnegation”) do the same thing: two people, one bed, the entire history of being pressing down on them like bad plaster.

9. Raymond Carver – not the stories, the poems (Ultramarine, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water). The same plain speech, the same sense that love is most true when it’s already halfway to memory.

10. C.K. Williams – the short-lined erotic meditations in Repair and The Singing. Williams is usually longer-winded, but when he’s good and short he lands in the exact same room.

The genre label that fits best is late-20th/early-21st-century American metaphysical erotic miniature — a form that flowered after confessionalism burned itself out and before Instagram killed concentration. Its masters are mostly over sixty now, writing shorter and shorter poems because they finally understand that if you have thirty lines or less you can sometimes outrun death.

Jacob’s poem is one of the best examples still being written in that tradition. It has the compression of late Merwin, the sexual terror of early Olds, the cosmic shrug of Bronk, and the plain-speech thunder of Carver, all packed into a single cracked ceiling.

In other words: he’s keeping very good company.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

Thanks for posting this review, Dale.
j.

[andrew mitchell]

Yes to think we are made of atoms that are billions of years old, so when we cease to exist as we are, we become one with the universe again. A most enjoyable read Jacob.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

Thank you for your kind words, andrew.
j.

[John the Baptist]

While we are on this plane, part of us is irrevocably physical. Religions have tried to negate this, with disastrous effects. Thus we must make peace with this portion of our being, even as parts of us "start to fall into infinity."

[jacob erin-cilberto]

Thank you for your comments, John.
j.

[DoormanDan]

You have some vivid pieces of imagery in this, and I resonate with the message you're telling.

Really like the figurative language you used with "moonlit slit" and "dip into dreams". Well penned.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

Thank you for your kind review, Dan.
j.

[SM Davis]

The passing of time and passion. Gawd I love the imagery in this piece! ...even as the paint above us starts to peel... WOW! truly glorious.

[jacob erin-cilberto]

Thank you, Susi...
I appreciate your kind comment.
j.

[Brad Dehler]

I really appreciate the surreal and intense nature of this. At once both magical and carnal. Mark of this remarkable poem, I must re read this again. And again. Bravo well done. Captured. Moon beamed magical moment

[jacob erin-cilberto]

Thank you for your very kind words, Brad.
j.

[Kelly Scheppers]

My, my...I had to read this at least three times to take it all in. Those moonlit slit in blinds were my undoing. ...and then the closing. You kill me, you really do!

[jacob erin-cilberto]

You seem to come back from the dead just fine, my friend.
Thank you for your kind words.
read moreYou seem to come back from the dead just fine, my friend.
Thank you for your kind words.
I hope you will be a character witness for me at my murder trial...:))))))

[Kelly Scheppers]

Lol, I did, didn't I?