Michael Hettich

Christmas in the Woods

Our twelve-year-old daughter walks around the cabin
wearing a red velvet sweater with a fake zebra
collar and silky underpants, singing.
Her toenails are bright red. Outside, small birds
flit through the trees in the gray light, and beyond,
down the bluff, the river pulls.

The radio in the bedroom is tuned to a discussion
of refugee repatriation in various
unfamiliar countries. In the kitchen, my wife washes
dishes and sings Christmas carols with our daughter.
I pour us more coffee. Yesterday, a friend explained
the coming extinction. He shared all the details:

Squirrels and weeds, he said, and pigeons
will be our wildlife. Since then I’ve been making
lists of what I need to see. Our son has started videotaping
everything we do and say, as though he might save us that way.

And so I’ll sing with my wife and daughter—
smiling at the camera, in this cabin in the woods—
to celebrate the season, and to remind us,
someday, how happy we were.

Garden

Inside my memory, there is a garden
I can’t remember, that covers the large
back yard of a small house I’ve never seen
in a city I’ve never visited.

The garden is planted in flowers and vegetables
with fruit trees for shade. There are feeders and bird baths,
a fish pond, and paths that wind through it all.

Someone I’ve never met works every day
tending that garden. He weeds and waters
and fertilizes. And he watches everything
carefully, so it won’t all go to seed,
like my own gardens do, in no time at all.

There are birds in that garden that live nowhere else.
Pain-birds and joy-birds, hunger-birds and grief-birds.

They all sing contentedly
in that rich and fragrant landscape
while the gardener works
and sings along, a human song.

Some nights, as I fall asleep, I think I hear him singing.

Insomnia

My wife believes certain
specifically balanced
aromas can cure us.
She believes in sound
therapy, touch
therapy, vibrational
medecine.
She believes in good thoughts.
She believes in conscious breathing.

Tonight, I listened
to the small birds swirling
our back yard, thought
of a tree I might plant
for its flowers, and listened
to the usual midnight
freight train, groaning
like the things in ourselves
we can’t keep ourselves
from returning to.

I wonder if anyone
walking by our house
through the strict dark of almost
dawn could see me
sitting here, naked,
writing this, bathed
in kitchen light and lavender
fragrance my wife
has told me is for peacefulness,
gratitude, and love.

Some Gestures Might Contain A Life
for my brother, John

1.
Three men stand on a sea wall carpeted
in chopped-up, brittle-dry bait minnows left
by the Sunday tourist fishermen, left by the seagulls—

and they gesture in ways that might signify I love you—
and they listen to the air, which seems full of night birds.
They talk about birds they imagine, and money,
and how beaches change shape, moving slowly with the current.

They talk loudly
in the balmy cloudless night:
One of them is going deaf, growing into silence.

2.
A long time ago, a boy watched his father
cry across a crowded elevator.
He wanted to comfort his own father like a father
and he couldn’t let himself let go
until he got alone.

A long time ago
a boy was forced to stay awake
to listen while part of his brain was removed
and examined, and when he saw his brother, just later,
he explained what had happened,
and he reassured his older brother:

Don’t worry. Everything went fine…

3.
We went fishing that winter, when my brother was still
in a wheelchair. The day was clear glass. He caught

an eel—as long as our father’s arm—
which refused to die. He had caught it, so we took it

home, to eat. And though our mother
smashed its head with brick and hammer,

it still flailed.
And when she chopped its head off

with the dull hatchet
my father used for kindling,

it flailed more wildly, spewing blood
all over the walls of our kitchen, the windows,

our parents. By the time it finally
lay still, it was bruised and flaccid, flattened

beyond recognition, the color of intestines.
--And then our parents broiled and ate it,

with garlic. Delicious they called out, coughing
into their napkins, chewing and coughing

and calling out enthusiastically to thank my little brother
for catching such interesting, such memorable food.

4.
All day you sat still
and you wished you could sit still.

All day you listened
to traffic, to birds singing
somewhere blurry.

All day
you thought
you could probably
disappear

if you only focused hard enough,
held yourself just so.

Holding Tight

Lately, these first hot summer nights, pale-green frogs,
the size of a human hand, jump against our bedroom windows
and hang on for awhile there, pushing their panting
green bellies flat against the pane. We notice them,
most nights, while we are undressing, talking softly,
or reading drowsily in bed. Sometimes
I put my palm against the pane, standing
naked in the sleepy room, as my wife turns off
the reading light and slips between the sheets. I imagine
I might feel that belly, I might feel that cool breathing.

Then, lying together, just before sleep,
we listen to the frogs hop or fall off our windows,
one by one; we listen to them push themselves
off into the ferns, where they start their peculiar
croaking, as we fall into sleep, curled
around each other, breathing each other’s
breathing, beginning
already to dream.

Back top

Cover Design: Joseph McNair