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Gardening
At Night
We worked until morning, folding the edges
of the night-blooming flowers and ordinary leaves
until they were moths, which flew up briefly
into the sky, then fell like dew.
Our words were common as "snip" and "gather"
but our syntax functioned like a dreamless sleep
from which we hoped we might wake younger
than we could be, though we'd never gone to bed.
And all night those spiders whose names don't appear
in the field guide wove clothing between our fruit trees,
so the small birds could dress themselves brightly and sing
even while they feasted on the ashes
still full of nutrients, falling as the sun rose
and the fist-shaped clouds started punching through the sky.
Black
River
I open the book I was reading last night
to find blank pages.
The apples in the kitchen, we picked together
while we talked of recipes and flavor, have turned
to plums, overnight. They are even more delicious.
We went to the ocean and discovered a lake.
So we swam out, pleased at the way fresh water
cleared our eyes, when we'd expected salt.
And then I went home, after many years away,
to discover events that had changed my life completely
hadn't happened there yet.
Some of those years I'd felt like a branch
leaning into a tannen-darkened river.
Some of those years I'd tried to become
something like that river, that smelled of rain
and shadows, that flowed so gently sometimes
if didn't seem to move at all, as it fell toward the sea.
Some Days
Just Feel Like
the book I continue intending to read
or the rhythms I blink with my eyes, or the moons
in my fingernails as I scratch your back
and look out the window beyond you, into
a wilderness of bushes we planted just a year ago,
now filled with purple berries and lizards
the length of my finger; the guide book full
of useful lies, like the color of the lake
we intend someday to live beside
or the river that flows beneath our house,
full of transparent fish we eat
sometimes when we curl around each other
too tightly to sleep, or wake in an unfamiliar
outskirt of our lives, where the accents are leafy
and windblown and full of useless gestures
like free improvisations without
melody, stories that flesh no plot,
or books we could intend to read
for years—until our lives are separate
from their bodies, and we are everywhere—
Poems
© Michael Hettich 2004. All rights reserved.
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Michael
Hettich is now a professor of English and Creative Writing at
Miami Dade College (Wolfson Campus), but when he was a mere
sophomore, in his first creative writing workshop, he realized
"in a flash" how he could dedicate himself "to
the making of an art that would allow one to tell the truth in
ways that made that truth sufficiently mysterious and resonant
that it might seem to sing outside the normal bounds of
time." He likes the "momentary immortality" that
poetry gives him. Reading and writing poetry have always been
central to his life, giving him focus and engagement and the
ambition to reach something that is always just beyond his
reach. He calls his poetry "small machines made of
words" and has published his "machines" in many
journals, including Poetry East, Smartish Pace, Bayou,
Cream City Review and Big Bridge. He edits
Tigertail Annual of South Florida Poets (the 2nd
edition is due in April). Last year he published Behind
Our Memories (Adastra Press) and his new book, Stationary
Wind, has just been published by March Street Press.
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Portrait
of Michael Hettich © Henry Denander 2004. All rights reserved.
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Poetry
Michael Rothenberg
Diane Thiel
Nick Carbo
Mia Leonin
Michael Hettich
Campbell McGrath
Kelle Groom
Steve Kronen
Kemel Zaldivar
Pris Campbell
Michael-Earle Carlton
George Murphy
Howard Camner
Geoffrey Philp
Terri Carrion
Nancy Knutson
Jonathan Rose
Barbra Nightingale
Ian Krieger
James Brock
Amy Serrano Zorrilla
Denise Duhamel
Virgil Suarez
Micro-Fiction & Shorts
Terri Carrion
Diane Thiel
Artists
Artist Intro
Ivonne Bess
Diego Quiros
John Canning
Jeff Filipski
Arlene Magloire
Cassandra Gordon-Harris
Holly Picano
TRES
Mia Leonin
Terri Carrion
Richard Blanco
Interviews
Campbell
McGrath
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Volume 16
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