[with 3 poems by Michael Hettich]
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Core
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The hawk in the white pine shivers, hunched
into itself like a state of being
.
we might think had vanished
if we’ve been playing
too long with our gadgets, or making arrangements
to assure our perfect happiness
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sometime in the future. The wind that tossed
cut-down trees
remains a ghost
inside our furniture, like the antique
notion of a soul, and ancient tides
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drew the swirls in the stones that line
our paths. Scars that mark the seasons
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our ancestors lived,
etched like tree rings
into the secrets we don’t even know
we’re keeping; a dream that woke us to forget,
.
a blue that dazzles the sky as only
nothing can do, in the morning.
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Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Mom has been put to bed, the nurse’s aide has left, and Dad leans hunched in his favorite blue recliner. As he reads each line of his novel, Dad turns his head left to right, back and forth like a cartoon character eating corn-on-the-cob emptying each successive line of kernels, or precisely the opposite, like a typewriter platen that only returns to its starting point when the line has filled itself. Three lines. Five lines. Now Dad’s eyelids droop, his book droops, and just beyond the pocked and cratered moon of his head the windows of the house across the street catch fire with the dying sun. The orange and smoke of the end of day.
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In a few moments Dad will jerk a bit, open his eyes, and read a few more lines. Some additional span of moments beyond that he will put down the book, heave himself from the chair with a grunt, stagger and catch himself on the wall on the way down the hall to bed. Irrelevant. This moment is the luminous, the sun’s reflection filling the neighbor’s windows before they eclipse and darken. This is the fulcrum moment upon which all prior moments and all moments to come must teeter and balance. Perhaps the three of us present in this old house feel its presence as we breathe in and breathe out, the very quiet house hanging by its fingernails to its own particular very quiet light in this dark whirling night-welcoming time-swallowing universe.
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As I continue to watch, Dad turns his head, a fraction of an arc just barely perceptible, left to right.
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❦
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Core – the first poem in the first section of this new collection by Michael Hettich – is indeed the core and carries me there with it. A state of being. The secret interior liveliness of things, of all things. The ghosts that connect every one of us if we believe their essence.
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I can’t turn the page. I have to return to the first line and begin again. Moments coalesce. I reread images and stanzas in different orders. It is a poem of being and a poem of becoming. I am filled with this one poem and overcome with the awareness of secrets residing in the most mundane things that surround me.
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My son-in-law Josh has constructed a hive, a Ritz Carlton of a hive in my view, and he awaits a swarm. He teaches me about the living organism which is a family of bees. When they sense some ethereal signal, perhaps overcrowding or overly plentiful surroundings, the workers begin the special feeding of a newly hatched larva who will grow into a new queen. The hive cannot have two queens. When the new matures, the old queen takes half the workers and leaves to swarm. If Josh is particularly blessed, if the offerings of beeswax and lemongrass with which he has anointed his hive box are acceptable, the swarm will take up residence and begin making new bees. And new honey.
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The thirty “new” poems in this “new and selected” are themselves such a living organism. They move together through darkness to bring flickering glimpses of light as in dreams. They know there is a core and they seek it. They find wildness in everything and they celebrate it. They are “a sudden glimpse into the silence between thoughts.” All the while the writer, and we readers, too, if we follow, questions the person he was and the person he might become. And in the process of all this seeking and discovery, perhaps each of us may encounter the person we are.
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The Halo of Bees, New & Selected Poems 1990-2022, Michael Hettich. Press 53, Winston-Salem NC, © 2023
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…
❦ ❦ ❦
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Another Kind of Silence
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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, scraping their wings,
then falling silent. It’s as though there were some
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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
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when you are talking with your friends and family,
even when you’re moving through a crowd, thinking
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Everything is wild at its core, even
half-asleep evenings in front of the TV,
even listless afternoons shopping
for knickknacks, 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
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the bats zig-zagging through the gloaming, singing
as they feast – another kind of silence:
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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.
.
Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
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❦ ❦ ❦
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The Dark House
. .
Trust the simple things, she said then, to lead us
through this dark house, hands outstretched to feel
what we can’t see, as we touch a wall,
a table, or a chair we can sit in and wait
for morning. Maybe we’ll talk of small pleasures
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or just listen to each other’s breath. We might seem to see
dreams flicker through our open eyes,
though it needs to be darker, even darker than it is now,
and they only flicker briefly. Don’t be scared.
We can hold hands and listen for our heartbeats, and maybe
.
if we can locate a window in the wall,
we can open it and let the outside darkness
rush in with its clarity and wildness; we can sit here
talking of what we imagine must live
out here, waiting for first light – like we are –
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or moving through the dark like the moon does, pulling
the tides inside us, oceans we might even
swim out in, naked and warm, until morning
when we’ll be out of sight, so far from shore
our lives there might go on without us.
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Michael Hettich
from The Halo of Bees
…
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…
❦ ❦ ❦
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