Conversations in the Changing Light
...they persist nowadays in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death...
- Vincent van Gogh
1.
Last night, she says, I woke up twice, once to my body lying in bed and once to grasses and trees in the field outside my uncle’s trailer in the mountains where we spent summer weekends in the silence of thin air at tree-line, fishing and wandering and planning the lives we would live someday and the lives we were trying to redefine back in the city. Then I turned over so I could fall back into myself and realized my wounds would heal my whole body and leave a scar which would be who I am. And that was fine.
At some point our bodies don’t fit into themselves; at some point we forget more than we remember, as we fall apart and blow away. There’s nothing else to do. But still there’s the infinite mystery of skin. The point is to get away from thinking.
My silence has a man inside it, someone else said then. Just look at the shadows as they move across your wall.
I hardly ever get up at first light. As I walked out I wondered whether I had ever been anyone at all beyond what I had done or the half-truths I’d written, and I promised to walk one direction until dark, stopping only a few times to rest. I could figure out how to get home later on, or maybe I’d sleep wherever I ended up. I walked slowly, but I kept on keeping on. I tried not to think as I walked, not to let the chatter of my mind become me, overwhelm me, determine what I sensed as I grew tired then exhausted, then woke up to my second wind and woke up to my third. By the time dusk fell, I was lost.
What is contemplation but a way of being born?
Another person lives so far out in the country she doesn’t remember the actual words. There are many people like her, even in this crowded world, even on this planet growing heavy with its human toll.
It’s a kind of loneliness, this sense of always naming things.
No one will remember you in a few years. Nothing but nothing will ever be the same.
The light of eternity sings through even the man who is kicking a little girl. How can we understand the secret of his misery? And who would really want to, in the wake of that hurt child? The train moves on through the deep snow, full of prisoners, all of them families with children. Even on that train someone starts to fall in love. Even on that train someone sings a silly song. In the morning you look out, still groggy, to see that train passing and pretend you don’t know. You pretend so well you enjoy your morning rituals. You have another cup of coffee; then you head to work.
Hurt dogs panting by the side of the highway, the loneliness of families inside every house you pass.
And still someone tells you he’s terrified of being touched. And still someone tells you the virus isn’t real.
You wake to fall asleep again until your body’s throbbing. Your bones will be burned someday; their ashes will rise up unnoticed, then fall again somewhere else, carried down by drops of rain.
Now she tells me she turned herself inside-out to lie flat as a sidewalk winding through a row of pruned trees in a park in some city in the future. She lay there and waited for the comforting weight of people walking across her. But no one and nothing, not even quiet rain. Eventually grass pushed up through her body and eventually a forest returned.
Sometimes, she told me, the wind moves right through us and sometimes the wind becomes solid like the ground.
Simply by living we inflict pain and suffering on more forms of life than we heal.
Nothing but nothing moves gently through the world.
We look up without warning to see explosions in the sky.
Joseph Cornell, Observatory: Corona Borealis Casement, 1950. Mixed media. SFGate.
2.
So little poetry means anything but look at me.
A quiet utterance like a box made of tiny wing bones that lived inside the body of a bird no one has named yet, a bird that’s never been seen for long enough to be caught or photographed, a bird we know only from the skeletons we find sometimes in our attics when we climb up to look through the old trunks for photographs of people we remember only vaguely.
Bones and scraps of feather lying on the windowsill, covered in spider webs and dust.
We think of birds flying through the attic while we sleep; we wonder how they got there, and we search for openings.
We’re happy though to know some creatures have no human names.
Someday the entire world will be unnamed again. Even the rocks will have another chance to sing.
Until then we gather bones and make our tiny boxes.
How many footsteps will you leave until you’re air?
Robert Morris, Blind Time XIII, 1973. Graphite on paper. MoMA.
3.
The goal is to wake up and then to wake again.
The creek is always doing that, as it tumbles down the mountain. But then it grows sluggish as it moves toward the ocean, clogged with dirt and the things we’ve thrown away: gentle words and open doors and gently-woven blankets; eyes that gleam like silent bells, like flowers full of wind.
My mother, he says now, was always partly sleeping.
My father, he says now, lay down to feel the dew.
There are so many ways to tell any story, each story is simply the eyes through which we tell it. Still, certain truths are the same through every eye, in which case we tell the same story many times.
In each case an innocent man was killed; in each case a woman was denied what she deserved; in each case a young girl was raped and abandoned; in each case a young boy was told not to come home ever again, not ever.
A young girl’s father strangles her while she sleeps dreaming of her fiancé whom he has not approved.
The tennis coach strokes the calves of his protégé; he tells the boy to flex; he asks if he can test his thighs.
He kneels on her neck to make her say she’s lied.
She holds her little daughter down to teach the girl a thing or two.
A boy I knew tried to catch stray cats to burn them. For some reason other boys followed him, charmed. The Sunday school teacher tells the little boy he’s dumb. He tells him to stand in the closet with his Bible. But the little boy simply walks away.
Now she tells me he hurts things because he’s been so badly hurt. But then again others are hurt into kindness. And the flowers burst forth for the cruel ones and the kind.
Someday not so distant we’ll open the door to the place where nothing changes. Until then I can only hope to wake up at least once, like a big wave at the ocean fully crashing, full of shells, then whooshing back down to where it started. And that’s all it is, all it will ever be.
But you could ride that wave, she says, like learning how to fly.
Balthus, The Street, 1933. Oil on canvas. Moma.
4.
So many bees and ladybugs and dragonflies and butterflies in the bushes and trees.
I remember how my mother would wake me for school, those days of childhood when I still knew how to sleep, how she’d stand at the door and call me by some secret name, how I’d hear her from deep underwater and pull to the surface and light to see her there smiling and turning away, how I’d turn back then and fall asleep again, as though I could forget the big world I had to enter soon, as a person with my name and my parents and my silences; a rhythm and pattern that’s continued into now and will continue, I hope, for at least a little longer.
Then I’d stumble and trip myself into the morning; my dancing then was mostly a kind of falling down.
And grace comes so quietly: last night a pack of coyotes woke me barking and chuffing and howling around our dark house. I stood at the screen door, naked, looking out into the darkness, seeing nothing. Colleen snored peacefully while I stood there in my nakedness; then the coyotes’ voices or my absence woke her, and we listened to their voices together for a while. They moved off down the hill through the woods, and we turned back to our own private darkness. We held each other gratefully and gently fell away.
Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910. Oil on canvas. Wikimedia.
5.
Some people spend their whole lives speaking only to themselves, and only of themselves, even as they seem to be speaking to others. Other people never speak to themselves at all but instead address other people, other beings, and the world. Despite the obvious differences in attitude and presence, it’s almost impossible to tell which kind of person anyone is, including oneself. It’s like trying to see yourself in the mirror, or hearing your own voice: we can’t know who we really are, no matter how we try. Could this be our fundamental human affliction? After all, other creatures seem always themselves, in ways we humans just can’t.
Or maybe we can, in moments of release, when we’re lost in art or leaping off a cliff into the grotto pool, or losing ourselves in another’s embrace — but soon enough the tune ends, and we hit the water; soon enough we fall away from that other person’s touch — which is falling away into never-being-quite-here, falling into being-born-human.
Outside our small human lives the world is real.
What planet, she asks now, do you live on anyway?
I don’t think I’ve ever been lost in the woods; in fact, I’ve never ventured very far off the trail. So my wandering has always been written out before me, my explorations have always been mapped out and planned. But I’ve crossed the freezing rush of snowmelt mountain rivers and walked among bison, by myself. Stood still and watched the huge beasts huff and puff as they shuffled past; I’ve been charged by wild horses, challenged by black bears. A few times I’ve had to jump away from rattlesnakes. Still, I’ve never had to use my senses to get home. I’ve never had to sleep without dinner in the darkness.
I dreamed we were sitting at a long narrow table, talking only to those who sat directly across from us. We were sitting outside, under spreading live oak trees; I could hear the others talking but couldn’t make out what they said. I thought I should suggest we find a round table, or many round tables, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I got up and walked down the line looking for faces I might recognize. I saw then that the table stretched away into the woods and I turned back to sit down and resume the conversation I’d been hardly attending with the people I’d been sitting with, none of whom interested me, all of whose eyes reflected my own boredom back at me.
Why were we sitting there so dressed-up and pink-faced? Who was that figure standing back there, in the woods?
Jean Jacques Flipart after Jean Siméon Chardin, The Draughtsman, 1757. Etching. The Met.
6.
Then a man on the road stops me to say he lives mostly in his throat these days, mostly in his larynx. So I tell him the stars are still blue in the morning, the trees are festooned with seaweed after rain. He pulls out a pencil from his dress coat pocket and puts it to his lips like a flute, and so I walk on.
There are days without weather where you live now, she tells me; days without any more air than a stone. Does anyone follow you down into the memory you try to gather from the leaf pile we jumped in as children, that leaf pile you lost your whole body in once, when you pretended it was full of sleeping alley-cats who spit at us and shook their stumpy tails as we ran home to our mothers who were growing their fingernails and shining their silverware and singing in the language they grew up in, which wasn’t ours. You pretended you could lie down like train tracks and sing like any old man did, in the old days when most people played their own music, when we all knew the stories of our murderous tribe, the melodies that carried us across the huge forbidding sea so full as it is of naked bodies and broken stories and bones of all the creatures who have ever tried to swim. And pennies, even pennies, the kind to place across your eyes.
Every day there’s more to remember, so you discipline yourself to forget all those things that don’t matter anymore: your childhood accomplishments, the time you turned to stone at the sight of your grandmother dancing to the sound of a distant tuba which reminded her of where she had been the first time she saw him, the soldier she loved first, before she met your grandpa, the soldier who filled her to the brim with his secrets and touched her with ladybug wings to make her sing.
And then we say goodbye to the ambulance and the open range, then we say goodbye to the broken violin, goodbye to the almost and the never mind and maybe, goodbye to the open and the closed and the wind. Flowers turn to seed and are blown away into other flowers that look just like they did. Snow melts into the ground and, before you’ve forgotten yesterday morning, more snow starts to fall. Nothing can gleam in underground darkness but many things do so when we bring them to the surface, like the light in your eyes when you see someone coming with a fire in his cupped hands like carrying water dripping through the fingers. He will light you up before you can say anything, he will light you like nothing ever will again. Keep your language close to the heart of the matter she told me then, keep your words close to your most tender skin, that skin you keep covered like mica underground or like a kind of wound that makes a happiness-kite, a wound that makes a rug of contentment as you jump off the lifeguard tower into the freezing lake like you’re diving headlong into eternity. And then you swim down almost to the bottom, turn and look up at the light before you burst back up to the surface to breathe, pale as a blister. And no one ever notices, no one notices you at all. They are back in the woods, by the fire, telling stories. You listen to their laughter as you float there like a fleck of light. Then you swim in and climb out to join them at the blaze.
David Hockney, Woldgate Woods, 6 & 9 November 2006. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Rail.
Michael Hettich has published a dozen books of poetry, most recently To Start an Orchard, which was published by press 53 in 2019. A new book, The Mica Mine, is forthcoming from St Andrews University Press. His work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and he collaborates as often as possible with visual artists and musicians. He lives in Black Mountain, NC. His website is michaelhettich.com.