Ѐtudes. Studies. In music, these were thought to be mere technical exercises to develop a student’s skill with an instrument. Then Frédéric Chopin came along, so the story goes, and elevated the étude to the realm of highest artistry.
I imagine Michael Hettich similarly. He sits down at his writing desk to do these studies, these études. We call them poems, but they’re more precisely exercises in imagination. Deftly, he develops a scene or a circumstance in a few short lines. A kind of plot develops. The speaker wakes up from sleep suddenly. Or the speaker remembers how he used to see his father go outside to get the paper. Or the speaker notices a host of dead animals on the roadside as he drives to an event. Chopin will slow or speed up the tempo, add a trill here, an arpeggio there. Hettich decides to add a surreal detail—a crow he finds bloody and dying in the snow that he carries with him back to the house (“The Secret”), or his mother taking off her skin, leaving it for the speaker and his stunned siblings to marvel at as she lies down, presumably for the last time (“Elegy: Turning Away”). Or, absent a surreal image, he ruminates in “Hunger”:
[. . .] maybe we’ll wonder a little what the moon might see when it sees us, or not us exactly, rather the Earth that is us, spinning in its own immense darkness, pulling the tides in our bodies, whatever small oceans we carry and float on
Or he may express a desire, or engage in a revery, dredging up a memory that somehow fits the moment. Each is a tactic that Hettich is working out. His fingers are warmed up, he’s in control of his instrument, and he’s pushing himself into new regions of experience, extending the reach of his grip, deepening his resources.
Exercises in imagination, like morning or evening jogs to keep in shape. But there’s a foreboding sense that carries one through the volume, as if one is readying oneself in these little journeys for a much larger one—a dangerous one, one that will demand all of yourself, all your resources. As in a pilgrimage or a mission.
The volume opens with “The Secret,” in which the speaker is running, “carrying an injured crow,” trying to get it back to his house, even though he realizes he is likely not going to make it there with it alive. The crow, perhaps too obviously, is a symbol for what is dark and wild—perhaps the Freudian sense of the unconscious, or id. His wife laughs at the speaker’s little jaunts into the wilderness; she can’t be a party to the darkness, which is, by definition, hidden. Even though he spends his dream-filled nights sleeping beside her, there is a region cut off from her. The speaker says he doesn’t enjoy “touching wild things, hurt things,” but he finds himself glad that, though the crow will be dead by the time he enters his house, the blood will remain on his jacket, and he’ll put some of its feathers on the bookcase, and he considers burying it in the garden, deep under the snow, so that his wife might “discover his body, in spring when the snow melts enough to plant flowers.”
Animals abound in A Sharper Silence, but one gets the impression that they are more truly emanations from within the poet, who has the world in an imaginative grip. Hettich is a type of transcendentalist who could say, with Emerson, “Every natural fact is symbol of some spiritual fact.” But the animals Hettich encounters have come up from a deep, unmined place within, so that they are able to pull his consciousness deeper into reality than he had gone before. He’s pulled into a new sort of adventure in each poem by these unconscious emanations from deep within himself.
For what these études truly exercise is the spirit. The exercise is a kind of readying for death, the ultimate reality. Living only within what we can sense with our ears and eyes and fingers and mouths will not get us far enough. Encountering only those ideas which we can tame and manipulate will not prepare us for the fall into the abyss. And so Hettich’s poems dare to take us into the deeper encounters where spirit overwhelms flesh, where flesh falls away (as his mother’s does in “Elegy: Turning Away”). He reveals this effort in “That Glinting,” where he says,
it’s a prayer, like the grasses might sing, of perfect
being: I want to make sure I’m as real as water under water that’s deeper than light, water at the bottom of the world beyond darkness
The book is dedicated to Colleen Ahern-Hettich, Michael’s wife, who died of cancer earlier this year. The reader would be able to know about Colleen and her death from the situations described in the poems; some of them involve her radiation treatments, or the times he lies down with her in bed or sits with her during her bouts of extreme pain or nausea. In “A Sharper Shadow,” he writes,
I feel something of the tenuous, even in our silence, as though we were counting our breaths, preparing ourselves to let go of each other, maybe sooner than we know.
And so the poems take up the challenge to journey a little way into that final darkness, venturing through imagination into that unseen realm, down deeper into the self, to find out if something lasting might reside there.
Many of the poems subtly encourage an idea of the possibility of resurrection. In “A Kind of Happiness,” the speaker sneaks up to a bog “at the mid-winter thaw” to listen to the “wood frogs singing.” He says, “It feels like disappearing / then coming back renewed.” He writes, in “A Sharper Shadow,” how “the snow falls at night, to glow in the morning.” And in “That Glinting,” he thinks of how “we hardly remember who we were then” at earlier periods of life, and says,
It’s as though we were falling, falling through our bodies toward a puddle-sized swimming pool, preparing ourselves to slip into the water like dancers, or as though
we could remember the feeling of slipping through our mother’s body into this bright world, carried by her screams of pain and strangled joy, then screaming ourselves, pink and helpless, knowing
absolutely nothing about anything at all.
It is frightening, yet wonderful, to consider the abyss of death that way—the screaming pain and then the “pink” entrance into new-born existence, knowing nothing, having to learn all over again.
Hettich discovers an innocence as he dives into the depths to find what will last when the skin is peeled off this life. In “The Flowers,” he describes how he and his wife came to the tropics “from the gray north; our bones still ached with cold.” But in the ocean water that “was warm enough for us to take off our suits,” they could “sing like children, and talk like children back and forth, / not baby-talk but a kind of innocence.” In “Radiation” even cancer treatments are seen within the rubric of resurrection: A couple goes through a maze of hallways down into a basement for treatment, where friendly nurses ask if there is anything the woman needs and a doctor explains “what is to come,” then “turns and leads them back into the hall, and out / into the huge bright world, where they stand blinking and dazed for a moment.” “Angels in the Trees” is reminiscent of Richard Wilbur’s often anthologized poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” in which laundry on a clothesline becomes a metaphor for angels. In Hettich’s poem, his wife hangs her dresses out to dry “across / the mountain laurel branches,” but forgets about them overnight. In the morning she at first thinks “she sees a choir / of angels standing at the edge of the woods.” When the speaker retrieves the dresses from the trees, she puts on the one he
bought her when we were still almost children. She’d stopped and gasped when she saw it in the shop window. It fit perfectly then—
but she looks even more beautiful now all these years later, a she walks around the garden smiling at the new flowers, barefoot in the sun.
Is this wish fulfillment—saccharine imaginings of an Eden that could only exist in the mind? Escapism, rather than mission, or pilgrimage? Soaring above on thin air, rather than climbing the mountain, step by difficult step? The care and craft of the poems makes the beauty and hope seem deserved. And Hettich realizes what he’s doing. In the volume’s longest poem, “A Strange Sort of Wonder,” which provides remarkable detail about the devastations of Hurricane Helene and its aftermath in the Appalachian Mountains (where Hettich lives), he lets us see his skepticism. In one scene, he seems to mimic what his poems have been doing, practicing for death, when he lies “down in the chilly, dew-drenched grass / as though I might understand something that way / or feel something new. But cold is just cold—.” Later he wonders,
Will we leave a trace when we vanish from our bodies, the way downed trees leave their trace across the land,
an absence that beckons new life from the ground?
Will something like our breath continue to move through grasses and bushes and ferns, to ripple
the pond we love, that holds itself tighter each day, as winter approaches?
His answer to these hopes is telling: “Of course not, though it’s somehow reassuring / to consider, an idea that gives solace, / if only briefly.” But the skepticism doesn’t fully hold either, for in the next lines, “Already the land / is healing, the sun warms the ground in different places now, and the breeze moves differently. // In spring, new saplings and flowers—.” Hettich’s hope in resurrection, despite the skepticism of his intellect, keeps finding its correlative in the beauties of the natural cycles all around him.
Much of Hettich’s method seems to stem from John Ashbery, of whom Charles Simic once said, “For him, each moment of our lives, each thing we say, is equally true and false. It is true, because at the moment we are saying it that is the only reality. And it is false because in the next moment another reality will replace it” (“Tragicomic Soup”). Hettich’s poems are études within the liminal space between the known and the unknown, the verifiable and what can only be imagined. It is the space poetry and the arts uniquely occupy, allowing ourselves to reach out beyond what we can comfortably grasp to grapple with what cannot yet be defined. The étude is the work of a master, for training purposes, to show apprentices possibilities for the way ahead. We are Michael Hettich’s apprentices when we pick up A Sharper Silence.
