Page 66 - WTPVolI Vol.#4

Michael Hettich
The Truth
After we’ve attended the lecture on the ways ocean currents are interwoven
with the migrations of fish and birds,
insects and winds, and after we’ve watched
computer models of the Amazon breathing and burning, models of the ways all living patterns are falling out of balance—clouds of toxic dust that look like flocks
migrating in every direction—we come home
and walk through the woods behind our house,
up beyond the trail, where the streams are just dribbles sweating from boulders; we walk to the ridge-top
as the autumn light fades. Through the trees,
another ridge of trees, and below that, the town
hums faintly. We sit quietly
and watch the dusk thicken to darkness
with the sense that we might be lost here, so close to home, and the sense that something wild
might show itself to us. And then we feel our way
down to the trail, and back to our house by the light of the moon, in silence.
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Hettich has published over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently Bluer And More Vast: Prose Poems, which was published by Hysterical Books in 2018. Other recent books include The Frozen Harbor (2017), which won the David Martin- son/Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press, as well as a Florida Book Award; and Systems Of Vanishing (2014), which won the Tampa Review Prize. A new book, To Start An Orchard, is forthcoming from Press 53. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Orion, The Sun, and Poetry East. He recently moved from Miami to Black Mountain, NC.