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[ poetry by Michael Hettich ]
Waking Up Alone
—Colleen Ahern-Hettich, 1955-2025
[from section 11]
Though it can’t be true, I imagine I’ve been in love
since before I was born; and because it can’t be true,
I imagine the same is true of her, my true love.
As a child, before I knew her, I was moving toward the day we’d meet.
As a young man, confused, I ws moving toward that day,
even as I met other women and seemed
to find myself with them, or nearly, I was really
moving toward her, my true love.
Now I don’t know anything about anything at all.
Not even where I am. Every morning
I move another stone from the creek bed to the path
I’m building through the broken woods, toward her. I don’t know
who I am otherwise, and the stones are heavy.
I stumble a little as I lift and put them down.
•
Once I was a girl, she shays now. I didn’t know you.
Once, before that, I was earth, I was air.
Once, before I knew you, someone took a breath of me,
someone drew a path up the mountain, above the trees
and slept there for years, like nothing really can
and survive. I survived in the gleaming.
Once I was a shadow, the shape of a sleeping
body in the grass, in the morning. Next morning
the grass stood straight again. There was no trace of me.
•
I’m tring to write only of what seems essential now,
though I don’t know what that is. I’m trying to find it
like a man in the dark of a motel room somewhere
trying to locate his keys.
[from section 12]
Sometimes I can only write about Colleen
without writing about her, just as I can only
say what needs to be said by telling
a story: Yesterday, I sat on a hillside
and waited for something. It was sunny. I was not
hoping for an animal or a change in the weather.
No, instead something like a letting-go of language,
forgetting the person I’ve made of myself.
I could crawl inside your body, my love, and disappear
like most memories. You were here; then you were gone
and never gone. The wind through the young trees
moving as though it remembered the old ones,
their massive trunks, their canopies and vast root systems,
their voices. Then it falls silent.
Michael Hettich
from Waking Up Alone, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory, NC. © 2026. Winner of the 2025 Lena Shull Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society.
❀ ❀ ❀
Insomnia
If I could remember to breathe the way
you breathed beside me, sleeping, I might
slip into the absence you left me
and sleep, myself, inside the rhythms
your dreaming embodied—not the dreams
themselves but the deep in-and-out of your sleeping
beside me.
. . . . . . So I lie here, in the bedroom we loved in,
under the roof of the house we loved,
under the stars and moon, the clouds
and migrating birds, the winds and all
I’ve forgotten, and I try to match the rhythms
of my breath to yours, my love, absent
but still here beside me in the darkness.
Michael Hettich
from Waking Up Alone, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory, NC. © 2026. Winner of the 2025 Lena Shull Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society.
❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
Although it is quiet this morning here on the porch, somewhere rain lashes at sharp angles and a thrashing tree threatens to fall on a house. Although here the morning birds have settled themselves in the rising heat and only one cicada is singing, I can hear in the distance the low hum of an engine. Men and women are working, children are getting bored with summer, everyone is wading through life in this silence. Maybe for a moment, as they look through their windshields or at their screens, as they look at their mother making a sandwich or their co-worker so intent, maybe for a moment they also look inside. What do they discover there?
Michael Hettich’s Waking Up Alone is stillness and storm. It is confusion and stumbling insight. It is looking back and looking inside, but mostly it is silence. Awakening to days when dreams do not relinquish their hold as the sheets fall aside. Nor nightmares. But also waking into the continuous tangle of story and dream and memory that gradually resolves itself into recognition. Waking up One but not really Alone.
Few books of poetry have so gathered me up and taken me into the mind of the poet. So into the poet’s heart. These poems, and especially the extended titular poem that is the center of their universe, urge me out of my distractedness. They open a space for me to encounter my own silence. The smoke and ashes of my own dreams rise to swirl and struggle into life around me. Perhaps a mark of the most insightful poetry is how it prompts the reader into contemplation and insight of their own. Writer and reader join together on the journey of awakening.
❀
Purchase Waking Up Alone from Redhawk Publications HERE
More about the NC Poetry Society Lena Shull Award HERE
Other poetry by Michael Hettich at Verse and Image
https://griffinpoetry.com/2026/04/20/poetry-and-earth-night/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2025/12/26/a-sharper-silence-michael-hettich/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2025/09/26/poetry-at-cary-arts-center/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2024/09/27/anticipate/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/07/14/magic/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/07/07/catch-fire/
https://griffinpoetry.com/2023/03/17/archetype/
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