Two Poems by Michael Hettich

Song

I was living that year in another sort of body, when she came down the stairs singing a song I
hadn’t heard before but somehow recognized,

so I tried to sing along. She stood there before me as the crows in the trees cawed black light and
the yellow birds up in the sky swooped down to land in our bed and nestle in our breath-warm
pillows. Who are you now, my bones started whispering but by then I was blowing away, thinking
you’re blowing away, so you might as well dance

and the dance we did then was anything moving, like ghosts do in the closet of your childhood, or
the memory of falling from such a great height it will be years before you land—long enough to
imagine an entire new life for yourself and another one for all those happy people you’ve loved
and all those people you’ve loved who’ve been lost

and you must be lost, she reminded you again, to be found. But of course no one’s ever really
found: I was with you, she said then, when the rain couldn’t fall, and I was with you when the
wind stopped moving, when the great wind decided to hold itself still

so you hold out your hand and wait for the dove to land there, that imaginary dove sent by a
relative from so long ago you can’t even imagine her name now, many many years ago, where the
wind truly doesn’t move anymore and light is like a whisper you remember from inside your
name, where animals never born in the real world are moving through the bushes and small trees
that look like bonsai and another kind of language is approaching from a great distance

and he looks like the Green Man from many lives ago, the Green Man who is carrying his head in
his arms, turning into trees as he leans to embrace you, smelling like flowers and spiderwebs and
dust.

The Field

The tall grass, heavy with morning dew,
leans down as though it were praying;

when the breeze disturbs it, the whole field seems
to shake itself with pleasure, though pleasure is probably
something tall grasses don’t feel

unless we are watching them. And thus the world is born.

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