Long-time resident of Miami poet Michael Hettich has been writing and publishing poetry for over three decades now. His friends and students here in South Florida have luckily benefitted from the closeness and dialy-ness of his presence and work, so too have many of his long-time readers here and abroad. As the three poems to be shared here will show, Hettich’s is a poetics of external and internal metamorphosis and regeneration, at once fed by and still feeding from elemental forces many times taken for granted because of their everyday groundedness in time and place. With a powerful impetus that has always seemed to me Ovidian, his poetry is always immediate, action-packed, vivid and engrossingly visceral, even when subjective fancies enter lyrically or narratively mid-stream. In an always trusting and refreshing manner, his poems invite all readers to dwell in them for a little. His are poems to be lived, explored, worn, dreamed or, many times, breathed as mantras.
To prove these highlighted observations I have taken three poems from Michael Hettich’s The Animals Beyond Us (New Rivers Press, 2011), a fairly recent award-winning volume. Because he is readying to publish a new collection in April (tentatively titled Systems of Vanishing), I purposely took three arguably recent poems that deal specifically with a poet still trying to cope with the almost decade-long loss of his father. And the beauty will be apparent immediately—for they are not poems of morbidity, rigidity, melodrama or woe-is-me lamentation; instead, they are poems of remembrance that have transformed personal loss, change and impermanence into a newfound wakefulness, a here and now celebration and witnessing. In these poems there is no hint of regret, just a new “way of staying present.”
Measuring the Days
My father dives in and swims off across the bay,
tries to swim all the way to the other side,
swims past slag islands of mucky-drift and mangrove
crowded with birds that don’t notice him.
If he makes it to the other shore he will walk home, barefoot
and dripping. This is his weekend routine,
his way of staying present. But of course we miss him,
cutting the grass or walking through the neighborhood,
talking to acquaintances or glancing at the sky.
Even the minnows swim through him now
as he slowly dissolves into the current. And we remember him
like hair and teeth, like skin–if we remember him
at all. He swims as he always did, steady
and relaxed, reaching forward and pulling, kicking hard.
Concrete and Mortar
I dreamed I was running backward, through fields
and woods, feeling as though I was about to
crash into a rock, or a tree, or fall into
a river and be swept away. But still I ran on.
The windows in our bedroom this morning are dusted
with pollen that smells like damp mushrooms, or like
pipe tobacco in a rarely-opened drawer.
The wild coffee is blooming too, and full of buzzing bees.
Your father has died, two thousand miles away.
The mortar anchoring the bricks of the house
he built with his father, the house you grew up in,
has been crumbling away, falling back to sand.
The workshop he built himself in the back yard
will be pulled down; all his tools will be scattered.
We were married in that back yard. Even the mountains
are slowly coming down. I remember that basement,
the cool darkness where your brother slept the days away, for years.
I remember your mother making cards and gifts down there.
Everything is secret, or else it wouldn’t need to be.
Everything is waiting. Certain days we couldn’t see
the mountains from your parents’ street. Other days they loomed.
The Small Birds
They ask us to understand our grief
by simply leaping out, trusting the air
which is far more complex than sorrow, to follow
all we’ve ever done with a pure heart and change ourselves
completely, but never for long.
Someday, you say, you’ll be glass in a window
that looks across a landscape of wilderness and snow
which will melt when you go out there and walk, because
you’ve loved someone well. But whom do you love,
after all? For now, you open that window
and lean out. For now you just watch things: vivid rugs
on hardwood floors, closets full of clothes
that would never fit you, where another person’s smell
lingers for years. And then it vanishes.
