MICHAEL HETTICH ~

 

from This Melody

10.

He told us his parents

            were angels who lived

                        in the branches outside

            his bedroom.

They whispered and tapped

            at his window when he slept,

                        so he climbed out and sat

            in that tree for a while

with his parents, and looked at the moon.

26.

If I built a secret house

                                    and filled it with fireflies

                and filled it with an evening

                                                         teeming with bats

                            then told you, pretentiously,

                                                     this is how I love you:

                Imagine a bat's face

                            as it zigzags through the darkness,

                its wonderful, vein-stippled,

leathery wings.

33.

Divorced and alone,

              she works the night shift

                            and when she gets home

                        at dawn from her one-room

                                        apartment and rides

                         through the empty city streets

no hands.

36.

And when was the first time

                        you realized you were lost

                you ask as we drive home

                          later, and when I found you,

                did your bones become sharper

in your body, did your teeth

                 gleam any brighter, and did your secret bodies,

                 the bodies that lined up behind you in the past,

                  did they shift underground

for a moment?

41.

Angel of knowing we've seen that face before.

                Angel of highway, angel of trains,

angel of the funky breeze, angel of the slapped face,

                angel of the out-of-tune, angel of the outer space.

Angel of pesticides, angel of the endless-seeming,

                 angel of the families we've walked away from, angel

of everything we've ever said, angel of our silence.

48.

He buys a hotel and empties all the rooms,

            removes all the windows and doors,

and walks around pretending he could be a different person

                        in each room he enters

                until he forgets himself,

for a little while. You think this can't happen?

Wind and rain ruin the floors, wild

                 animals make nests, and eventually a stranger

remembers who he was once. With that, he disappears.

__________________

Michael Hettich

The Mica Mine

St. Andrews Press

2020

MICHAEL HETTICH ~

"MARIMBA" ~ MICHAEL HETTICH ~

Marimba



The man I wish I'd had the gumption to become

back when I was green and restless

requested that when he finally let go

his bones be fashioned into a kind of xylophone

and that the rest of him be buried

by the lake he loved.

He wished that his bones be played

on chilly autumn evenings when loons called

and leaves whispered a leathery language

as the wind prepared them to let go.

Beside the lake his sons could make a fire

and burn his clothes and books,

then roast whatever they could catch and feast.

But he died before I noticed, fell away

as a propped-up scarecrow falls from his scaffold

or the way memories fall from our minds

and become like small animals, mice or voles,

that know there are hungry owls in the woods

but can't stand to stay in their cramped nests any longer

and need to take a look at the moon.



_________________

Michael Hettich
To Start an Orchard
Press 53 / Winston-Salem
2019

MICHAEL HETTICH ~

Forgiveness


A person put together like a bundle of sticks, tied tight with twine and leaned in a corner because he or she looks beautiful there. A person swept up like sawdust on the shop floor after a day spent building sturdy furniture.  Or a person imagined in the egg-filled nest abandoned in the live oak, a nest that will fall in the wind. I told you one morning a person is an empty train moving through the mountains at night and waking a woman who listens to the wind in the trees when the train has passed. She gets up and goes outside in her nightgown, walks across the chilly grass and steps into the creek that runs across her land. She stands there feeling the cold water and the stones, returns to her home and lies back down. Her skin is the color of a candle in the dark.


And you whom I've loved forever disagreed, asserting that a person is something else entirely, a subway car full of sweating strangers, rushing under the river at night while tugboats and tankers negotiate the currents and flounders look up from the mud. A person is the newspaper that falls to the floor, amongst all those aching subway feet, and a person is the woman who leans to pick it up, smoothes it gently and begins to read.


She will walk home soon through the balmy summer streets, to her husband who's cooking and singing as he waits for her. A person is the sidewalk that leads to her front stoop. A person is the music she hears in the distance, a song she remembers from church. She hums it, growing hungry as she walks. A person, I said then, is the glass of wine she savors, the bottle she shares with her husband. But another kind of person is the bike someone stole from the rack in front of the library, a bike which was given with love, for Christmas, that's being stripped now and spray-painted gold. On other days a person is more like the opossum with a baby in her pouch, who sniffs at the back door. We watch her push the garbage can around, trying to knock it over but afraid of hurting her baby if the can falls over on her, so she gives up and walks off across the weedy grass to look for papaya, broken open and rotting, or for mango and starfruit waiting in the bushes. A person is that appetite for sweetness in the dark.




————————
Michael Hettich
Bluer and More Vast
Hysterical Books, 2018

AN EVENING WITH GARY SNYDER ~

MICHAEL HETTICH ~

The Happiness of Trees



I slept that summer on a screen porch in the woods
     with the creatures and insects singing so loudly
my mind seemed to join them — out there without me —
     to move around like a breeze from form to form


and then to return as a fox or a cicada,
     some other night creature, to slip back inside me
humming whatever it had heard, patterns
     I couldn't sing along with but felt inside


like the happiness of trees when a soft wind
     turns their leaves' pale underbellies up to the sky
and makes the sap rise. I love to wake
     before myself, to silence and fog.


Sometimes I got up and walked out into the chilly woods
     and sometimes I turned over as though this happiness
might last forever, and slept just a while
     longer, until the first birds sang.


—————————

MICHAEL HETTICH
The Frozen Harbor
Red Dragonfly Press, 2017

MICHAEL HETTICH ~

The Measured Breathing



And so I understand, at least for a moment,
how something and nothing can sometimes be reversed,
as I understand nothing: The black in a crow's wing
works like my deepest sleep when I wake
beyond mere self, that black like the waves
lifting their shoulders in a sudden swell of memory
or just a sudden swell. If everything we needed
were real, those delicate yellow-bellied birds
might fly through this thicket without brushing anything
and I might come home to a house full of absence
and meet all the people I've loved, sitting there
in the bodies they had then, but stuffed now with straw,
propped up and grinning. As my body too
is stuffed with dry grass, which pokes through my clothes.
I was hungry and you fed me — just enough to survive
until I was only what I am now, disappeared
into the music behind all this sound,
as the trees are connected to the trees of their past
through roots and branches and leaves — without thinking
anything we'd ever recognize as thinking,
anything we'd recognize: a place beyond this air.

Michael Hettich

Systems of Vanishing

University of Tampa Press

2014

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