The Distance Birds Fly Through the Dark
Poems by Michael Hettich
The Poet | Elegy | A Window | Measure
The Poet
decides to enter a foreign language by moving abroad and wandering the strange city’s maze of streets until he’s lost and has to ask directions back to his hotel—and since he doesn’t understand anything they tell him, he gets more lost— and when he finally arrives, after midnight, he climbs to his room, turns the shower to scalding, faces his naked self in the mirror, and mimics what he’s seen and heard as he wandered, until the mirror’s so fogged he can’t see himself. Then he goes out again. Back home they remember him only rarely, when they look at the snapshots or notice the old clothes in his closet, which smell like just-mown grass and open windows. And when he’s found a job and learned to walk and gesture like they do here, he wanders to the edge of the city, looks up at the moon and imagines men landing there, setting up shop, beginning to figure out how to market that desolate landscape—and he misses what he can’t say in this foreign language, and he wonders if a person could stand so still he might be invisible, so he tries that, thinking of trees, and pebbles, and clouds.
Elegy
1. Forgive me, she says now, dropping her children’s baby teeth along the path to guide them all home: earrings and dandruff to identify her days, light bulbs that flicker in her basement while she sleeps. She thinks she once walked into a tunnel beneath the city and lost her colors. Another night you dreamed she’d given you a dictionary that translated everything into a language no one’s ever spoken, a forest of ghost trees: Now she is a stone you keep on the mantle and pick up sometimes to feel the weight of nothing— but your father was one of those fires that never goes out, a flame that burns in your pillow. So you stay awake for years, until your windows sing in his voice, look through me to see. You look like a scarecrow as you walk, a clown no one laughs at, or an actor strutting a stage-set toward a phony wilderness, searching for your kidnapped wife and children. You hold a hankie to your nose for the scent of your wife’s perfume, to help you find her. You breathe to remember you were once a city kid playing punk guitar, snarling two-minute ditties, a skateboard- showoff and the kind of long-distance runner who grows more skinny each mile. But now your mouth is bleeding like it did the first time you kissed her. She bit, and claimed it was mere infatuation. So you burned the hair off your forearms to impress her and showed her your closet of fishhooks. The movies you watched those first days are your most vivid memories, not counting the children, who looked like bats when they flew from her body to cling to your clothes and hair as you walked holding hands, imagining a cottage in the country, with a pond full of frogs, and you croaked like a horny bullfrog to explain to your wife the pleasures of real dark, and silence. 2. Then your children flew off into the dusk-light to feast. Your wife was as pale as an underground insect, milky as the unspoken folds in our bodies. When it rained, her clothes melted away and you lusted for a taste of her, like waking in a cave so deep the light’s never reached there, and the animals are real and not-real at the same time, like children. And if you keep walking your bones will snap, and if you keep walking, dreams will be your cataracts. All you’ll be able to do then is melt as the cave drips its ancient water from a spring humans-not-quite-fully-human once drank from when we still wore fur. And now you think you smell their ancient human funk in the darkness. You follow that smell. The world can’t end as long as it stinks, but still you hold your wife’s hankie to your face as you walk and breathe through your mouth. Someone’s dreaming fish bones pushing through moldy flesh, someone’s dreaming mushrooms in your body. If you lay down right here and thought about nothing, you might learn to be a river moving through the darkness, full of blind fish whose bones we can see through their quivering scales. If you lay down long enough your body would carve a scar into the ground as it flowed downhill, toward the ocean. 3. Now you remember when you lived another language, when you and your wife took your clothes off and waded across the freezing river to wander a boulder field looking for the angels. Your body up almost to your heart went numb but you made it to the other side. If you could meet a wolf, how would you address her? But there are no wolves here. If you could meet the glinting dust. But it has all been blown away. If you could meet the animal you truly are, beyond your little human rhythm-dream: There’s an echo. Now it’s gone. 4. So we turned to ghosts as we walked through that river as the river fell into a pool so cold our teeth went numb. Leave yourself in the path. You were only part-real anyway, and so you were doubly lost. The search party never found anything to name you. But there are ashes in the tree you sat beneath reading the notebook you’d found at the bottom of your mother’s secret trunk where she’d written many names to describe you: I am not clouds raining sawdust or a fire in the attic that burns all the keepsakes; I am not an eel writhing at the foot of your bed. I am not a ravenous dog tearing through the garbage cans just before first light, and I’m not some swollen tick. You still remember when she slept so late the game was over by the time you arrived at the field; you remember listening while she sang to herself in the kitchen. You keep the urn of her ashes in the crawl space where no one ever goes, but you still need her, like those ashes need the fire they came from: evidence of burning.
A Window
broken by the moon, a bleeding pigeon thrashing on the sidewalk, your dead friend’s shoes, that fit when you don’t have to walk, or when your breathing reminds you of the days he sang out-of-tune pop songs. You tried to sing harmony— wind above the trees, that pushes the same moon toward the horizon, where a man dreams of fur and barks so convincingly real dogs believe him: Soon the whole kennel is howling, keeping everyone awake. But then again, the trees, and then again the fields that push up against the woods we’d hide in, growing wild and opening the windows behind our eyes, as the planets howled through the sky to remind us of the time before things happened, that ancient moment standing at that wood’s edge watching the rain that’s fallen forever. The past in our marrow, those hurt dogs howling at the moon inside our bodies—until we wake somewhere impossible, as though we were grasses whispering in a gentle wind. And then the wind falls still.
Measure
Before certain colors were born inside the body, those colors that breathe in the dark, we imagined we could crawl up inside our own bones and listen to our heartbeat; we let ourselves get lost inside the languages of not-self, until we understood physical syntax, like dance or the distance birds fly through the dark, and we tried to touch what was regal with life as we traced the crack in the stone where water had seeped for millennia, opening darkness—.
Michael Hettich has published a dozen books of poetry and an equal number of chapbooks. His most recent book, To Start an Orchard, was published in September 2019 by Press 53. A long-time resident of Miami, he moved to Black Mountain, NC, in 2018. His website is michaelhettich.com.
Other Mudlarks by Michael Hettich: Measuring the Days, Chap No. 40 (2010); Nature and Other Poems, Poster No. 128 (2015) and Recording; from Any Shore by Dusk Light, Poster No. 108 (2013); Howling at the Moon, Poster No. 34 (2001) and Recording; The Moon Beneath The House, Poster No. 108 (2013); and The Point of Touching and Moving Bodies, Poster No. 15 (1998).
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