Another Kind of Silence
Sometimes the world grows louder, you realize,
just as the day falls still
and insects whose names you’ll never know
start screaming and laughing, scaping their wings,
then falling silent. It’s as though there were some
technology that could capture your dreams
and throw them on a screen, to show you to yourself
and confuse you more deeply, you who are not
alone but live in solitude, never
seeing anyone but yourself, even
when you are talking with your friends and family,
even when you’re moving through a crowd, thinking
Everything is wild at its core, even
half-asleep evenings in front of the TV,
even listless afternoons shopping
for nick-nacks, or food. And food is especially
wild. Just think of all those apples
and grains of rice, just think of that wine
ripening as grapes in the bright sun of some
foreign country, the bees and even
the bats zig-zagging through the gloaming, singing
to each other as they feast—another kind of silence:
music your ears are not built to hear,
like the roots of these trees, humming as they soak up
the puddles that have deepened for so many days
you hardly remember how the sunlight feels
on your body, how it makes you squint
and see things differently, the way it makes everything
waver and shimmer, like a mirage
you walk toward, never arriving.
Extinctions
In the back yard we stood in the twilight and watched
thousands of birds flying south.
We wondered if anyone knew who they were,
and we wondered how they knew where to go, whether
we’d ever have any sense of where
we were or were going. Of course we were just children.
In the house, our parents were turning on lights
and walking around with purpose, talking
loudly about things we couldn’t understand,
things they would shush when we walked into the room.
We could see their shapes though the living room window
as we stood there, looking up into the sky
at those thousands and thousands of small lives, flying
somewhere, yelping and singing to each other
as they flew. And when it was too dark to see
we turned and went inside for dinner.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book, The Mica Mine, won the 2020 Lena Shull Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society and was published in April 2021. Other books include To Start an Orchard (2019) and Singing With My Father (2017). His website is MichaelHettich.com.
Read additional poetry by Michael Hettich appearing in Terrain.org: two poems, Letter to America poem, two poems, and one poem.
Header photo by Larissa-S, courtesy Shutterstock.
