Michael Hettich

Editor's Note: Congratulations Michael, on the publishing of your new book, Flocks and Shadows: New and Selected Poems. We present here two previously published prose and prosepoem pieces..

One Place

…the hedgerows actually had a sound…As bees buzzed and wood pigeons cooed, you could listen to God’s creation and take pleasure in its subtle variety. --Robert Lacey: The Year 1000

Certain places are defined by a relationship between sounds and silences that can awaken the body to its capacity for listening attentively, which is itself a charm to awaken the other senses. I think of the immense, humid silence that seemed to muffle our voices as my wife and I walked through the Fackatchee Strand, years ago, listening for breeze and Florida panther, coming across a small grove of thorny orange trees planted half a century earlier, long since gone wild but weighted with ripe oranges full of sour juice that tightened our hairlines and puckered our very brains; I remember the rumbling of thunder in the distance as we marveled at the taste of those sour oranges and felt for the first time the bites and scratches that scribbled our pale bodies; I remember the halo-hum of insects in the heavy air, the gargling splash of mullet moving through the brackish mangrove slough, the croak of alligators we took at first for horny frogs.
I have come to believe that my need to write, and to write poetry specifically, grows from a yearning to answer immense and perfect sounds with appropriate, if imperfect, sounds of my own. In this sense, at least for me, poetry serves as a primal response to the natural world, a prayerful form of earthly dialectic. It is certainly true that the memory of places that have sounded richly to me forms the setting of many of my poems, not in the apparently literal sense of their forming a picture in my mind, but in the more elusive, figurative and potent sense of their having sounded me in resonant ways, when I was there. The sounds of some of these places have continued as echoes in the part of my memory I consider (perhaps naively) most fully me.

* * *

            Many years ago, following the death of a close friend, I camped for a few days by myself in spring in the mountains west of Boulder, in a popular hiking and camping area that was virtually empty in that chilly season. I went there impulsively, hardly telling anyone, carrying only a daypack and a thin sleeping bag meant for summers at low altitudes. I’m not sure, now that I think back, how long I actually stayed up there. I think I might have bragged to people I met later that I’d hiked around in the mountains, by myself, for weeks. But I was a city boy, and an Easterner, so even a few days, even that close to a city, taught me a great deal about things I needed to know, things I would have been hard pressed to translate into words—except maybe in the way yearning sometimes translates into song.
            Far more nearly unhinged than I’d realized by grief and by a shivering taste of my own mortality, I walked to keep my thoughts in my body, to exhaust myself. Then I sat as still as possible and watched aspens turn up the pale underbellies of their glittering new leaves at me, shaking their thousand arms in a hypnotizing dance. I listened to wind sweep down the long slopes, across the patchy snow and boulders and early flowers, and I let that wind get inside me however far it could.
            Did I take out my voice and leave it like some fallen bird’s nest in the dry, winter-flattened grass? Did I sleep beside a waterfall and wake shivering morning dew? Did I lie naked in the sun until I glinted like mica and gave up my body to the tiny silent birds?
            I know for certain that I read Rexroth and Rilke and imagined I could hear the boulders cooling as dusk fell into the darkest dark I’d ever been inside of. The billion stars scared me in their very multitude, and I tried not to think of their various infinities as I looked up at them through my own infinitesimal eyes.
            One whole day I climbed ridges to tiny miner’s cabins, slung on the mountainsides amid rubble and debris from some vanished recent history. Another day I walked all the way to the nearest little town just for a destination and a cup of coffee, just to watch people go about their lives.
            In those few days I might have learned to hear things more clearly, to recognize nuances in the sound of my footsteps, to hear in my breath how small I really was, how little I mattered. In that realization, I might (I think) have started to heal.

                                                                            *                      *                      *

            Early that winter my brother visited. We tried in vain to quit smoking together. He lived in Arizona then, and I think he was visiting to make sure I was coping adequately with a sense of futility that was beginning to define me. His presence made me feel things I hated feeling—from grief at the loss of my friend, to an impotent sadness, which felt like anger, at his stumbling, rambling gait and attitude. We tried to cross-country ski where I’d camped by myself above Boulder. I don’t know what possessed us to ski—he’s had no balance since he was sick as a child, and he’s never liked vigorous sports—but try we did, much to my (not his) frustration. John’s struggling to ski—his falling and sliding and continuing to get up and try again although it was clearly hopeless—felt like an objective correlative of all my frustrations: I felt the nausea of helpless rage, and I lost myself. Kicking off my skis, I ran down the slope, jumped on my brother, and wrestled him down, into the deep snow. The day was still, and cold. He didn’t wrestle back, as he had no idea what I was doing. I punched and kicked him and cursed his disability and spat out insults to him and to the world. He just looked at me, half buried in fine snow, unhurt and unfazed beneath his thick clothes, waiting patiently for me to calm down. We rolled and flailed around as though we were making awkward angels in the snow.
            I don’t think I had any idea, at that moment, of why I’d attacked my brother, of why I was so angry at him, of all people. But somehow John understood me, and he held me, even as I tried to hurt him, even as I tried to hit him in the face. He held me, and he looked at me, and I think he even let me hurt him some. He forgave me, I think, even as I hurt him. I don’t know why or how. And then, as we lay there in the cold and deep snow, in the perfect afternoon, hugging each other, breathing deeply, a silence rose up inside me, the kind of silence that enters deeper than hearing, that has nothing to do with absence of sound, the silence that lives at the core of all being; the kind of silence that must exist inside rocks and other solid things. I’m sure he felt it too. We were relieved of ourselves for some moments, I don’t know how long, brothers lying together in the empty snow. I remember the smell of that dry snow, the way individual flakes skitted across the crusty surface of the snow.
            We hugged each other and vanished into that silence until dusk fell and the evening breezes started sweeping down the sky.
            Then, I don’t remember how, we walked or slid down the mountain in the dark.
            Early the next morning, John took a bus back to Arizona, having forgotten or forgiven—as always—how rough I’d been with him.
                                                                                     *                      *                      *
            About six months later, after I’d succeeded in giving up smoking and learned again how to learn to be content, I met a woman I felt connected to almost at first sight, who had grown up in those mountains, and we camped together the day after we met, in the same place I’d camped alone, near the place I’d tried to hurt my brother. We walked all day, talking whatever came to mind, while her dog ran around us, chasing invisible birds. It was early summer; the ground was wet, and wildflowers were everywhere. The river was high; waterfalls roared. We walked up to a small lake at the top of the mountain. After we set up our tent, she walked down to that lake and a few minutes later caught two small fish, fingerlings really, which she gutted with her thumbnails and grilled with garlic and cornbread.
            That night we slept with our heads out of the tent—her idea—so we could look up at the stars. We talked about everything, far into the night, while dew wetted our faces and made them glow. By the time I fell asleep, I felt I knew her well.
            Next morning, we climbed up above timberline, up the ridge on the other side of the lake. There was snow there, wet and crusty and slick, and I jumped off boulders, straight down, to slide on my feet for a hundred yards or so.
            The sky stretched forever. The day tasted of spring. I loved the way I felt when she watched me slide.
            So I showed off awhile; and then, after some coaxing from me, she jumped too, laughing but tentative. Jasper the dog barked encouragement. And she did well at first—until she lost her balance, caught her foot on a dry patch, fell head over heels, and began to tumble, fast and out of control, down the mountain, toward the nasty-looking boulder field at the bottom of the snow. Without thinking, I flew down that slope, jumped in front of her to break her fall, and tumbled down across the boulders, grunting and dramatic but perfectly unhurt.
            Of course I was immensely pleased with myself, though I tried not to show it. And, of course, she was impressed.

            Silence and breathing and the gurgle-drip of melting snow. We stood without words, looking at each other. Then I climbed back up, as far as I could go, to leap and slide and tumble down again.

That Day

I ran into a girl I hardly knew. I was wondering when you'd get here, she said, held out her hand and asked me to walk with her. The attics in remnant farmhouses all over the suburbs filled with moths and bees as we held hands -- shyly, at first -- and walked. Soon all the clothes and old photographs stored in those dusty places were tattered and the rafters were hung with buzzing hives that dripped with honey. We walked too far, all the way into town. She had beautiful eyes.

As a child, I told her, I knew a man who could take out his glass eye. She claimed she knew a person who could take out his tongue. He'd put it on the kitchen table, pucker his mouth into a circle, and stare as the tongue rolled itself into a ball or tried to crawl away. I asked her whether that tongue could taste anything when it was outside that strange man's body and she pulled her hand from mine as though I'd made an obscene suggestion. Could it speak any words while it was in the open air? No, she said impatiently, it just purred softly.

She told me Thoreau kept samples of plants and flowers in a compartment in his hat. She said he studied the world he walked through as though he might that way understand God. He listened to the wind, often hearing old friends he hadn't seen for years calling out to tell him what was blossoming, where the ripe berries were.

I felt like an afternoon turning into evening; I felt like daylight savings time. You would love me, she said, if you had the life I'd imagined for you. I love you anyway, I said enthusiastically. Suddenly, it was raining, hard enough to drown things, hard enough to melt things, hard enough to sing farewell.

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Cover Design: Joseph McNair