Michael Hettich

Flocks and Shadow

...inevitably, a thing well suited to its surroundings--
a snowflake, a sailing ship, or a spoon--acquires
a true beauty of refinement: the soft dove-brown
of the buff-breasted sandpiper, the sun color of
the golden plover, the warm leaf tones of the
woodcock are essences of earth and grass, of
cloud shadow and the swift seasons.
--Peter Matthiessen, The Wind Birds

1.
Every bird at my feeder is someone I’d love
to sit with in a beautiful garden
beside the ocean--and who cares how much
wine we drink
because afterwards we’ll swim
until we are refreshed, and then we’ll take a nap
in a cream-colored room with translucent curtains
and a quilted bed. Each bird at my feeder
is someone I’ve wanted
to speak a foreign language with--
it doesn’t matter which one--to decide we’re going
to move away together
to where that foreign tongue
is spoken, to leave without packing. Goodbye.
Each of these birds has been inside the house
of my body. Come in. Yes, the windows
are so clean there might as well be no glass
at all. As though there were no real world
beyond these small rooms. Come closer. Small birds
are singing between us as though the air
between us were different
from air in the rest
of the day, as though there were a waterfall of air
between us when we look at each other with just
the right expression. We are full of heavy bones,
but they hardly matter, since we are also full
of bird bones, which are hollow. And light.

(continued)
2.
(Whatever you feel becomes part of your nerves,
someone chatted over champagne, reaching out to touch me
gently on the wrist. We were standing outside
on damp grass. What you hear becomes
part of the ear, she said, and the more
deeply you listen the more fully the sound
becomes you. What you taste with pleasure
becomes your tongue. She smiled. I looked away.
There were moths in the grass. They fluttered up
with each step we took. Sometimes a cloud
of moths swirled up
into the torches that burned
around the yard, sparked briefly,
then fell back to the grass. What I thought at first
was the smell of their burning
was actually the scent
of perfumed bodies moving beneath
perfumed clothes and across a dark yard
in which rare flowers blossomed, sending out
fragrances to seduce
what they needed from the night.)

3.
I read yesterday that by the middle
of the next century, all the largest
predators but us
will be functionally extinct.

I read there is little anyone can do
about it, little to change the course
of the world we’ve created as it works
on the world we have not. I read yesterday

of a man who’d had his eyesight restored
after a lifetime of blindness, who couldn’t
recognize anyone--the various colors
in his wife’s hair confused and frightened him

a little. Where, I wondered, was the person
he’d touched before he could see? How did she
look to him now, when they touched? And where
was he? I mean the person who’d been blind.

(continued)

4.
And everywhere I seem to be, birds are singing just beyond
the window, barely audible above the hum of air
conditioner, TV, or traffic, singing
their intricate beautiful messages, like

parts of myself I often find
too easy to ignore. But as soon as I lean
close, turn off the machinery, hold
my breath and listen, they scatter, flying

off in a burst and a breath, leaving
silence to settle behind, reminding me
of the dreams I keep at the tip of my tongue,
of the songs I sing, just breathing.

Her Imaginary Moths

I love these antique windows that open
so wide, and I love leaning out—like some young girl
in a folk tale, whose lover waits disguised
on the ground, in the moonlight. Would you mind going down
and whispering my name so I can lean out to you,
so I can invite you up here with me?
We’ll light scented candles and we’ll walk around watching
each other; we’ll touch each other gently, and then
we’ll turn away, as though we’d just
remembered something. And then we’ll turn back
again, and again. Later we can go outside
so late we won’t have to get dressed, since no one
around here stays up past midnight; we’ll walk through
our neighbors’ back yards and fields, glowing
like the moon, intoxicating moths, which will gather
in a huge cloud around us and try to fly into
our bodies the way they fly at streetlights
or into candles, and burn themselves to ash.

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Cover Design: Joseph McNair