Michael Hettich

Cello Music

Small mammals pulled out of our bodies, to sniff
our bedroom, into our closets, into
my wife's cello, which she'd laid on its side,
still humming, before turning out the light.

They chattered and sang and woke other animals
in the walls, to call at the creatures beneath
the house, and those who live inside
the pipes and insulation; soon

the whole house was singing and we were breathing
more deeply in sleep. I dream, sometimes,
of floating far out, where jellyfish thicken
the currents; I watch the way they move

as I float there, until I move like them.
My wife dreams of tall men and sleek fur -- and what,
what can I do but hug her? Animals crawl
across our bodies, gnawing us in places

we'll never notice, though if we sleep
long enough together, we might grow grasses
and trees where there have been only wild
flowers and dragonflies, butterflies and bees,

none of which lives longer than a season.

Before the Word Before

A small dog lives inside a lonely man, in a little room
built into the intestines like a tree house in a tree.
At 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 his human free.

Aunt Betty

When Aunt Betty was little
she kept her dolls in a fish tank, a glass house
of flaxen-haired babies she nursed and groomed.

My mother keeps those dolls still
in a shoe box under her bed—
heavy, yellow, grim-faced—
in remembrance of happier days.

Her sister, she’s told us, loved to give things away.
Sometimes she seemed to let go of herself,
stepped out of her coat like a shadow.
Once, after school she gave away her favorite shoes
to a girl she’d just met, as a gesture of friendship—
a girl with bigger feet than she—
and walked barefoot in the snow across Brooklyn.

My mother loves to show us pictures of her sister,
who looks like a chair in some photos and a sofa
in others. In my mother’s favorite portrait
Aunt Betty is a vase on the dining room table;
in another she’s a small patch of scrubby city garden
and a row of heavy cars weighing down a winter avenue.

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Cover Design: Joseph McNair