Poet of the Month: Michael Hettich
May 2012

Listening to Owls

            No earlier
            could anything that is here
            have been
                        --W.S. Merwin



Those creatures that sing intermittently at night,
what are their real names? We call them owls,
lying in bed with the windows open,
reading, starting to doze off. Everything

is becoming itself, or else it wouldn’t seem
to change, as a fire burns until it has consumed
the source of its burning, which is why we stare,
because we are burning too, even lying here in bed

falling off to sleep. There are moons inside our bodies,
and stars. The real world is huge in there too,
and it doesn’t have anything to do with us at all,
beyond its location. As soon we might be dreaming

small rivers, bright rushing beyond ourselves, inside
our bodies. Hug me: A place beyond this air.




*****



One person doesn’t mind living without skin
for a little while. Another doesn’t seem to mind
giving up his teeth for the common good, chewing
with his fingers. And yet another says he doesn’t mind

casting off his fingers. But he lies. He must be singing
someone else’s notion of a song, some kind of river
moving underground, beyond our constant digging down
into the dark. Someone said just close your eyes

while all the other creatures just kept singing. I will never be
anything other than I am now:
a leaf or, on the lucky days, something like a river
leaping off a cliff I had no notion I was falling toward

and flying briefly, always landing where I’ve never been,
moving down whatever mountain, shivering this cold.




*****




And when I tried to treat my own body gently
I walked across the lawn as though I were carrying
myself in my arms, or when I tried to balance
my own face on my face like a mask made of skin

made of bark or like the texture of leaves, if all the leaves
could fall at one moment—one long afternoon
in autumn—and you found yourself bursting into some other
body, as a song finds other shapes and makes itself

grasses, or a tree, or a path that leads eventually
into grottoes and caves, or where our pets wear masks
so they can stay animals while they pretend
to be lawyers or teachers, scientists or even

front doors and windows, sidewalks and hinges
waiting to be dirt again, yearning to be worn away.




*****




Because we discover what we can’t understand
and burst into flame, without burning.
Because the road is never really paved, and the sidewalk
only divides the manicured lawns

that are sprayed to kill the insects, and so must kill.
Because there must be reasons for doing things, always,
or nothing will get done. Because we can’t be sleeping
and walking around in our consciousness for long,

talking to whatever talks back at us, because we fall
back into the swirl of life, back into the stream
no matter what we try to do. Her nightgown like the wing
of a moth or butterfly, dusted and so delicate

it will fall away and she will stand before herself.
Her nightgown like a snake’s skin, curled up in the grass.




*****




Living high up in the kind of trees
that don’t even grow around here anymore.
Living in the pine groves that stretch to the horizon.
Living in the live oaks, in the way they cross their branches

and hold small puddles to the sky, in their crotches
and crevices. Living in key lime, lemon
and orange, in the mango and the sapodilla.
Living high up in the trees that hold the kind of wind

that needs to rest a little. The trees that hold the sky.
Remember me she told me once, and then she disappeared
into another kind of tree. Living in the trees that grow
inside our bodies, the trees that form another kind

of forest, that extends from one person to another
to another, until we feel ourselves as air.




*****




Such simple pleasures: walking, looking at the sky
and seeing a vast flock of small birds with gleaming
white bellies moving off like a cloud, too high
to identify, even with the guidebooks. Some happiness

can only be touched that way: by avoiding it,
by watching it from the ground, by trying to name it,
by failing at its name. I slept like a river
because of you someone might say, walking there:

I am sleeping like a river, that carries rain or snow beyond
itself, into the ocean, or at least into a larger sense
of water. You can do it, someone told me; you can wake up
and live. Who lives here like an open door

but me? I kept asking, but of course I understand I am
just a river, never sleeping. Sing to stay awake inside.




**********
 

 Published in Poets & Artists