Guitar

I built this guitar from our double bed
every morning before I dressed for work,
as darkness grained into light. I worked
outdoors: I loved the dew-soaked quiet
and the songs of the first birds. I tore that bed apart
slowly, remembering the nights my wife
and I had slept there hugging, and the nights
our small children filled the space between us,
when that bed was a raft we delighted to float
wherever the currents ran—
I thought if I built it carefully enough
my guitar might retain
the hum of that contentment.

The bed was a wedding gift. My grandmother told us
her grandfather had made it, from trees he’d cut
from his own land and milled with his bare hands.
She told us she thought she’d been conceived there.
She said her own daughter, my mother, had too,
as I had, and our children. It would make a good guitar.

Someday, I promised, I would learn to play
and prove to my family I hadn’t been wasting
my life, ruining their most valuable possessions
for nothing. Someday I’d finish building
my instrument, and sing so beautifully everyone
would understand. Until then, we’d sleep on the floor
and I’d sing a capella, and I’d get up before
the birds, every morning, to whittle and nuance
dark wood in the dark, and wonder what possessed me.

ISBN 0-9745909-0-8
59 pages $15
Bio

Michael Hettich was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953, and grew up in New York City and its suburbs. He attended Hobart College, where he began to write poetry and where he studied with Anselm HolIo, who introduced him to such writers as George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Frank O’Hara, among many others.

After college and a year as a runner on Wall Street, Hettich moved to Colorado, where he studied poetry with Burton Raffel at the University of Denver and met his lifelong friends, the writers Alan Davis and Karen Osborne, as well as his wife, Colleen. After the death of their good friend, the poet Carol Dragone, he and Karen Osborne started Moonsquilt Press, dedicated to publishing outstanding young American poets. The press was active until 1985.

He and Colleen were married in 1981. They moved to North Florida for a teaching job, and the next year to Brattleboro, Vermont, where they started a gallery/art space and small press book store. In Vermont they found a compatible community and they made many lifelong friends, the painter Gib Taylor and the poet Bob Arnold and his wife Susan in particular. The death of their first child at birth, though, combined with financial difficulties, forced them to leave Vermont after only one year and to move to Miami, the last place either of them would have expected to move, again for a teaching job. They’ve lived in Miami ever since.

In 1985, their son, Matthew, was born, and in 1987, their daughter, Caitlin. In 1991, Hettich earned his Ph.D. in English and American literature from the University of Miami. That year he began teaching English and Creative Writing at Miami-Dade College, where he has taught since, receiving an Endowed Teaching Chair in 1996.

Since the early 1980s, Hettich’s poetry has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including The Literery Review, Witness, Poetry East, New Letters, The Indiana Review, The Midwest Quarterly, TriQuarterly and many others. He has published two full collections of poetry and a number of chapbooks, including three from March Street Press. He has also published academic and personal essays, and numerous poetry reviews for The Miami Herald. He is currently working on a book of essays about a wide range of subjects, including poetry, hearing and place. He has received various grants and awards, including a State of Florida Individual Fellowship in poetry in 1999.