Sample Poems by Michael Hettich
The Simple Truth
I met a man in the grocery store checkout line
who told me—out of the blue—he couldn’t
recognize himself in the mirror, although
he felt perfectly normal otherwise—responsible,
reasonably content, married twenty years.
Each time he looked in the mirror, he told me
while I unloaded my groceries, he saw
a different person, and he had to touch
his cheeks or speak his own name aloud
while he stared at himself, to ascertain who was
staring back at him. He wanted me to know
how hard it was to shave. He wanted to explain
how, sometimes, when he looked at other men’s faces,
he thought he saw his own features reflected back at him.
He told me he winked to test what he saw,
to see if that other face winked at the same time
or a moment later, in response. That could be
awkward, obviously. He said he thought he recognized me,
reached out and touched my face, standing there in line,
while the check-out woman scowled and the people lined up
behind us made noises of impatience with their carts.
I stared back hard as though I didn’t know him,
but then I gave in, reached out and touched
his face in reassurance, and gazed into his eyes.
Before the Word Before
A small dog lives inside a lonely man, in a little room
built into the intestines like a tree house in a tree.
At night while the man sleeps, the dog keeps faithful watch
in the absolute darkness; he barks at all suspicious
noises: the gurgle and grunt of digestion,
the moan, the cough, the rasp of troubled sleep.
Some nights the man is awakened by the barking
from deep inside his body, so he lets his dog out
to sniff his apartment, to show him all’s well.
And the good dog never wants to go back inside
when the man smiles and whispers, raises his shirt
and pats his hairy belly—but he is just
a dog, after all, so he does what he is told.
He likes being in there when his master walks
through the city, singing softly, or talking to himself.
He’s comforted by the lulling rhythms of the man’s walk,
and he dreams, while he sits in that man-dark, of wolves
and foxes, vast fields he could run across
until he grew powerful, and smart as pure hunger,
until he might swallow a human, keep him
inside his body, which is like a vast woods
before any stories we’ve ever heard were told,
before anybody had walked across the snow,
before there was before. And there he’d let his human free.
Only Child
My father dressed up as though he were my mother
who dressed up like me, who pretended I was her.
We spent a whole year as each other, to discover
who we really were. I still can’t comprehend
how my mother’s clothes fit me so well,
or how she, with her full figure, fit into my jeans.
My father wore makeup to understand our world.
Certain words, he said, are disguises, like love
and happiness. Others wear jackets
woven of translucent wings, as though they could still fly.
I walked around as a middle-aged woman,
afraid some boy might see through my disguise
and tell the whole school. My mother pretended
she looked just like me, but no one was fooled
for long. Except my father. He kept whispering words
of passion into my disguise, asking me to dance.
Aunt Betty
When Aunt Betty was little
she kept her dolls in a fish tank, a glass house
of flaxen-haired babies she nursed and groomed.
My mother keeps those dolls still
in a shoe box under her bed—
heavy, yellow, grim-faced—
in remembrance of happier days.
Her sister, she’s told us, loved to give things away.
Sometimes she seemed to let go of herself,
stepped out of her coat like a shadow.
Once, after school she gave away her favorite shoes
to a girl she’d just met, as a gesture of friendship—
a girl with bigger feet than she—
and walked barefoot in the snow across Brooklyn.
My mother loves to show us pictures of her sister,
who looks like a chair in some photos and a sofa
in others. In my mother’s favorite portrait
Aunt Betty is a vase on the dining room table;
in another she’s a small patch of scrubby city garden
and a row of heavy cars weighing down a winter avenue.