Thursday, August 31, 2017

MICHAEL HETTICH ~








The Happiness of Trees



I slept that summer on a screen porch in the woods
     with the creatures and insects singing so loudly
my mind seemed to join them — out there without me —
     to move around like a breeze from form to form


and then to return as a fox or a cicada,
     some other night creature, to slip back inside me
humming whatever it had heard, patterns
     I couldn't sing along with but felt inside


like the happiness of trees when a soft wind
     turns their leaves' pale underbellies up to the sky
and makes the sap rise. I love to wake
     before myself, to silence and fog.


Sometimes I got up and walked out into the chilly woods
     and sometimes I turned over as though this happiness
might last forever, and slept just a while
     longer, until the first birds sang.


—————————

MICHAEL HETTICH
The Frozen Harbor
Red Dragonfly Press, 2017