Michael Hettich
Approaching Equinox
These trees hold still, as if they were expecting
their birds to arrive, waiting for the weight
of those famished bodies to land and sing
I am starving to the grasses and leaves.
Yesterday we got lost when the deer trail
we’d been following petered out halfway up the mountain
and we tried another fainter trail which petered out too.
Sometimes if you lie down and pretend to go to sleep,
animals you’d never meet otherwise will come out
and watch you, sniffing the air to discover
what you’ve been eating
and how long you’ll likely live.
In the morning we collect the bodies of the just-arrived
sparrows who have flown against our windows.
We bury them in a shoebox beside the compost pile
and try to imagine the wide sky they flew through
above the rain clouds, mostly at night,
these fierce little creatures, so comely and light
we might even think they weighed nothing.
Angels in the Trees
Not that I want to be a god or a hero.
Just to change into a tree. Grow for ages. Not hurt anyone.
— Czeslaw Milosz, “Notes”
What does it mean to be forgiven? And what have we done that would call forth that yearning, the ache to let go of the moments we were less than fully alive to the suffering of others? I mean the times when we looked away from those we loved, looked away and pretended not to see, the times we could have given something, given something up, to appease someone else’s suffering, and didn’t.
There are folds and tears in the fabric of a life, caves and haunted landscapes, unborn languages full of dreams and memories.
In some ways that’s the work of poetry: to try to give voice to that unborn language.
After all, the ground here is woven with threads of mushroom filament; after all the ground here is woven with the nerves of trees. Rocks as old as Earth itself push up through the ground. Sometimes I collect the most beautiful rocks and carry them home to my garden, where I set them at an angle that pleases my eye so I can watch the flowers and weeds grow up around them. They will be what they are as long as time continues. For some reason this makes me feel content.
What does it mean, she asks again, to wake up? All the rooms of our house open up into landscapes, and all the breaths we’ve breathed there have joined the wind moving across the grass, carrying the pollen to the bare ground beyond. The bees are making silence and the little unnamed birds are flying through the thrilling grasses without touching even a single blade.
There’s dew, of course, on the grasses they fly through, dew in the delicate webs in the trees. If you listen with your other senses you can hear its music thrumming, like waterfalls or rain in the distance.
She drapes her drying dresses across the mountain laurel branches; she forgets them there, all night, and in the morning, walking out, she thinks for a moment she sees a choir of angels standing at the edge of the woods, watching her. It’s only her own dresses, full of dew now and smelling clean as snow. One of her dresses is hanging deeper in the woods, higher in the branches; we don’t know how it got there. I carry the wooden ladder back and prop it as best I can inside the flurry of twigs and leaves, and I climb up carefully and carry it down. It’s covered in eager little inch worms, so we hang it in the sun until they’ve slipped to the ground on their strands of filament. Then she puts it on, this dress I bought her many years ago in a foreign country because she’d stopped walking and gasped when she saw it in the window; it reminded her of something or someone she didn’t quite remember. And it fit her perfectly. The sales person nodded with a smile that looked genuine as we tried to tell her how grateful we were--but we couldn’t speak the language, and anyway the woman had turned to someone else by then.
My wife looks even more beautiful now than she did then, as she once again remembers what she can’t put into words and walks around smiling, barefoot in the sun.
I do know I looked away, pretending not to see; I do know I was selfish with my time, miserly with my gentleness and love. If I ever become a very old man, I might know then how to live. In the meantime I find boulders to sit beside a while.
Everything is passing, much more quickly than we know.
Michael Hettich has published a dozen books of poetry, most recently The Mica Mine, which won the Lena Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society and was published in 2021. His book of new and selected poems, The Halo of Bees, is forthcoming in 2023.