That Glinting
1.
Then someone discovered certain winds could turn inward,
blow around where nothing has happened, no one
has yet been born—like touching your love
who falls away to dust, then blows into another
language we’ve been speaking all the time without knowing
it’s a prayer, like the grasses might sing, of perfect
2.
being: I want to make sure I’m as real
as water under water
that’s deeper than light,
water at the bottom of the world beyond darkness,
water under such pressure it might
explode like wind if it could be brought
to the surface: wind from some ancient time
3.
or just another present moment, glinting in the window
of an old woman’s kitchen. She is singing as she pulls
the curtains to soften that glinting, turns back
to her cats who are purring
in response to her song,
which is tuneless, like a wounded animal out there
in the woods we are passing now, moving toward the night
4.
as the radio chatters incomprehensibly
though we grew up with the songs it’s playing, so many
years ago we hardly
remember who we were then,
though we do remember the words to those songs;
it’s as though we were falling, falling through our bodies
toward a puddle-sized swimming pool, preparing ourselves
to slip into the water like dancers, or as though
5.
we could remember the feeling of slipping
through our mother’s body into this bright world,
carried by her screams of pain and strangled joy,
then screaming ourselves, pink and helpless, knowing
absolutely nothing
about anything at all.
A Blue Afternoon
with someone else’s mind in my mind, someone
else’s memories
coursing through my heart,
and a whole flock of small birds flying through my body,
high above the clouds, heading south where the land
has vanished under the rising seas.
So they fly until they fall, and they fall for years:
We were sitting on the terrace with glasses of wine,
talking in code and watching each other
through the laughter and silences,
this fear of letting go
that defines and keeps us
from realizing we’re falling, though we are falling
always:
I remember learning
that somewhere, on the other side of the world,
there was someone who looked like me, doing
the things I would do if I lived there, thinking
thoughts I would think if I spoke his language,
which I didn’t. So I listened instead
and heard the world singing to itself as it moved
inside and outside my body, and heard
someone else calling, calling my name
from a place I could almost remember, like
we almost remember our dreams—or the scent
of an attic, a basement, a field of fresh cut grass—
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poetry, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022, was published in 2023 by Press 53. It won the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. A book of his interviews, And the Poet Said, was published by Hole in the Head Press in June 2024. He lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
Read more poetry by Michael Hettich in Terrain.org: two poems, two poems, Letter to America poem, two poems, and one poem
