"The Measured Breathing" by Michael Hettich

The Measured Breathing

And so I understand, at least for a moment,

how something and nothing can sometimes be reversed,

as I understand nothing: The black in a crow’s wing

works like my own deepest sleep when I wake

beyond mere self, that black like the waves

lifting their shoulders in a sudden swell of memory

or just a sudden swell. If everything we needed

were real, those delicate yellow-bellied birds

might fly through this thicket without brushing anything

and I might come home to a house full of absence

and meet all the people I’ve loved, sitting there

in the bodies they had then, but stuffed now with straw,

propped up and grinning. As my body too

is stuffed with dry grass, which pokes through my clothes.

I was hungry and you fed me—just enough to survive

until I was only what I am now, disappeared

into the music behind all this sound,

as the trees are connected to the trees of their past

through roots and branches and leaves—without thinking

anything we’d ever recognize as thinking,

anything we’d recognize: a place beyond this air.

About Michael Hettich

Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poetry, The Animals Beyond Us, was published in October 2011 by New Rivers Press. Other books include Like Happiness (2010), Flock And Shadow: New and Selected Poems (2005) and Swimmer Dreams (2004). The Measured Breathing, his forthcoming chapbook, won the 2011 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared in such journals as Orion, Prairie Schooner, Witness, The Bloomsbury Review, Poetry East, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He teaches at Miami Dade College.




For a review of Michael's most recent collection, The Animals Beyond Us, please follow this link: http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2011/11/book-review-animals-beyond-us-by.html