Michael Hettich

Behind Our Memories,
Our Larger Families Wait

Our other father wanted to taste the milk
of every species of mammal in North America
because he believed our human trace
started in milk, and because he loved breasts.

After that, he hoped to make
a journey collecting eggs, not only
birds, but lizard, spider, insect
eggs as well, to taste them, moving

ever lower on the great chain until
he understood the diversity and subtle
textures of life on this continent with
knowledge he carried
on the tongue and in the blood.

He walked everywhere, and he slept outside
most nights. He believed that if he learned to focus
well enough he would eventually be able
to tell the size of a field with his eyes

shut, be able to smell what mammals
lived in a wood and how many different
species of tree lived there too. He wanted
to fashion a language that incorporated barks

and purrings of all the wild creatures he encountered
so maybe a more nearly universal language
might be sung, at least in some
rudimentary form, and he tried to move

exactly like certain wild creatures, to make
only their sounds for days, to sleep
in the positions he’d observed them sleeping, to hide
the way they hid, to vanish the way

they vanished. Eventually he’d learn to fly,
to breathe underwater, to live without thinking
as a human. And then he’d move on
to trees and flowers, on to wind and silence.

*

At dusk my children and I walked along the train tracks, through a run-down
neighborhood, across a black shallow river in which manatees lolled. We watched the
wind breathe butterflies and tiny birds; we watched a kingfisher shoot its hatchet body at
its own shadow, skim the water lightly, circle up around and try again. That night I
dreamed I’d given birth to a baby whose umbilical cord looked like a hairy arm. I
dreamed she dreamed of crawling back inside, and I yearned to let her go back in; I
breathed myself larger to make a space for her. And that kind of breathing means
something, sure, as smells mean something when we haven’t slept far enough inside
ourselves and walk around all day like a half-opened door. The fragrance of wild orange
blows through our house all night while we sleep, intoxicating memories.

I opened the back door one late night and walked out
and knew what it would feel like when I had at last to disappear.

*

A small dog lives inside a lonely man, in a little room
built into the intestines like a tree house in a tree.
All night while the man sleeps, the dog keeps faithful watch
in the absolute darkness; he barks at all suspicious
noises: the gurgle and grunt of digestion,
the moan, the cough, the rasp of troubled sleep.
Some nights the man is awakened by the barking
from deep inside his body, so he lets his dog out
to sniff his apartment, to show him all’s well.
And the good dog never wants to go back inside
when the man smiles and whispers, raises his shirt
and pats his hairy belly—but he is just
a dog, after all, so he does what he is told.
He likes being in there when his master walks
through the city, singing softly or talking to himself.
He’s comforted by the lulling rhythms of the man’s walk,
and he dreams, while he sits in that man-dark, of wolves
and foxes, vast fields he could run across
until he grew powerful, and smart as pure hunger,
until he might swallow a human, keep him
inside his body, which is like a vast woods
before any stories we’ve ever heard were told,
before anybody had walked across the snow,
before there was before. And there he’d let him human free.

*

When doctors cut open this old man to fix his heart
they found a tree, just behind the breast bone,
thick and leafy, full of insects,
animals and birds.

And when they dug deeper they found not just
the one tree, but a whole forest full of flowers,
rivers and animals they’d believed extremely rare,
even extinct. They discovered they could wander
into this forest, just by pulling back
the dead man’s chest like a door, ducking,
and stepping in—

*

I read, half asleep in the pre-dawn dark,
standing in the kitchen after making my children’s lunches,

of a man who’d been arrested walking naked through the city
carrying a dress, who had tried to get dressed
when he saw the cops coming, an old man, almost
seventy. In fact he was Ernest Hemingway’s
youngest son, who called himself Gloria
sometimes, whose real name was Gregory Hemingway,
a medical doctor who hadn’t practiced
in years, who’d been married a number of times
and had seven children, who’d written several books
about his father—who was, according
to the police who arrested him, a perfect gentleman.
The next day, according to The Herald, he’d been found
dead in his cell—of natural causes
a prison spokesman claimed—in the Women’s unit--.

Then I drove my daughter to school,
came home and walked around my garden inspecting
the papaya and the wild lime, the scrawny carambola,
the basil and the wilting banana trees.
I watched mourning doves knock seed from the feeder
to the ground, flutter down and eat, oblivious
to the neighbor’s cat, crouched amateurishly
in the scrubby grass--.
The big trees were still dripping from last night’s rain.

When a drop hit my head, I was surprised at how cold it felt,
reminded, as I so often am these days,
of how thin my hair has grown lately, how quickly
our bodies fall away from us, before we’ve used them
in all the ways we thought we would. I looked up and noticed

the tree was in flower: small buds were opening,
spider webs were strung between the branches; they were filled
with drops of rain and the bodies of insects
whose insides had been sucked dry, who were almost as light
as air. Someday I’ll be as light as air

I thought, without regret. And then I headed of to work.

The Stories We Can Never Tell

We got up early to walk along the beach
which looked empty at first but was scattered with large fish
that had somehow been cast beyond the reach of waves
and were flapping a foot or more into the air,
landing with a thud on the wet sand.
We made a game of catching them in mid-air, tossing them
back into the waves, one after the other,
until they all were swimming again, and then
we walked, looking for shells and beach glass,
taking simple pleasure in our nearly naked bodies
in the sun and salt air: So when I mentioned
I believe the body and soul can know themselves
only together, that they are undefined
apart, I meant to imply something larger,
more inclusive, grounded and wild,
that reaches back into the stories we can never tell
because we are the arc of them, because we are their breathing.

Black River

I open the book I was reading last night
to find blank pages.

The apples in the kitchen, we picked together
while we talked of recipes and flavor, have turned
to plums, overnight. They are even more delicious.

We went to the ocean and discovered a lake.

So we swam out, pleased at the way fresh water
cleared our eyes, when we'd expected salt.

And then I went home, after many years away,
to discover events that had changed my life completely
hadn't happened there yet.

Some of those years I'd felt like a branch
leaning into a tannen-darkened river.

Some of those years I'd tried to become
something like that river, that smelled of rain
and shadows, that flowed so gently sometimes
if didn't seem to move at all, as it fell toward the sea.

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Cover Design: Joseph McNair