Michael Hettich


Maybe It's Music

            —for Colleen

 

I hardly remember the moments that changed me
most, she says, since I lost myself in them.

And when I emerged, to enter my body
again, it felt like being born
or whatever the trees might feel as they push
out of the ground
and yearn toward the sky

which is nothing, really, except the breath
we’ve exhaled through eons. And there you are,

my love, sitting in your cave of silence,
born and dying, present and forgotten,
holding your body before me as though

it could ever be solid. I can’t touch you where you sing.

*

I tried to think backward when I was most afraid,
to fall through my life
and enter that moment
I became me, but I couldn’t pull back

deeper than language. Still, somewhere
inside us the world grows wild. Somewhere

inside us the ancient caves are waiting
to be filled again with animals, wild and ravenous,
who will enter the sunlight and eat us where we live.

We sense them approaching each time we blink our eyes.

*

The first time I saw you, he says now, I felt
the trees start burning inside me—while out there

everything remained as it had been before,
glinting and throwing itself toward the light

then curling into sleep, entering dreams
that went on for years, for life. I could show you

dances we do without moving; I could show you
animals leaning out of themselves

into our bodies, animals we can’t see
except where we’re afraid. Have they come to rescue us

from our surly routines of mind and heart?
Have they come to save us from our automatic lives?

*

But nothing can be saved, after all, except the spaces
between things, moments and objects, thoughts
and blinking eyes. Your heart thumps and patters on

until it doesn’t. And if you enter
the cave inside any moment, you might see

paintings of animals we’ve made extinct
on the walls, and you might just see darkness, depending
on the light you are carrying inside you.

Or maybe you’ve come naked, to feel that awesome darkness
and have somehow forgotten your body, after all.

*

Process and design, she says now, is all we are,
like watching the bats flitter back and forth at twilight
then moving off into their darkness, to sleep.

Like watching the deer eat our garden at dawn.
Like scaring them off with a clap and a dance.

Now they watch us from the safety of the woods, big deer
we hardly ever see in broad daylight. And where
do they go when they die? Why don’t we find

their bodies in the woods? What grotto holds their bones?

What about the bears, for that matter, or the foxes?

Maybe it’s the night birds, that land when we’re sleeping
to rip things apart, and carry them away.

What are the names of those night birds, anyway?

And what is that barking, off beyond the trees?
Maybe it’s music, not barking after all.

Let’s hold each other more still, to listen
until our breaths and heartbeats are everything
and everything is stranger than it’s ever been before,
stranger and more beautiful. And always almost gone.

Michael Hettich has published over a dozen books of poetry, the most recent of which, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990–2022, published in May, 2023, won the Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. A new book, The Poet Speaks, a collection of his interviews with poets, is forthcoming from Hole in the Head Press. His awards include The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, The Hudson-Fowler Prize, The Lena M. Shull Prize in Poetry and a Florida Book Award. He lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

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