Blacksburg Books, Blacksburg, VA, April 23, 2026

Brit Washburn

‍Welcome everyone. Michael Hettich's poetry, essays and reviews have appeared widely in many journals and anthologies. He's published more than a dozen books of poetry across four decades and won lots and lots of awards and prizes.  You can read about these in his bio.  He holds a PhD from the University of Miami and taught for many years at Miami Dade College. His collection, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems 1990 to 2022, won the Brockman Campbell Award Book Award in 2024, and his collection, A Sharper Silence, which we'll mostly be talking about tonight, was published by Terrapin Books in 2025. His most recent book, Waking Up Alone, written in the weeks after the death of his wife, Colleen, in January of 2025, won the 2025 Lana M. Schull Book Award, and was published by Red Hawk Press this year. We're going to make every effort to find time to talk a little bit about that as well.

And now for a little backstory: I first met Michael over a drink with our mutual friend Sebastian Matthews in Ashville [NC] some years ago--I'm thinking maybe six or seven? But I have to say, I didn't really begin paying attention and taking Michael seriously until I heard him read at Story Parlor somewhat more recently, maybe in 2023 or '24. That night, his poems struck me as moving and powerful in a way that is arresting and rare in my experience. It was also that night that I met his wife, Colleen, who was at once sharp and warm, strikingly beautiful and obviously intelligent in a way that made me think, wow, Michael must be quite something to have managed to marry a woman like this.

I met the two of them again at a memorial exhibition for Sebastian's stepdad, the photographer Charter Weeks, the following summer, and got to talk quite a bit more with Colleen that night. I had the sense that she was someone I would have loved to have had in my life. But by then, her cancer had returned, and it was clear that she was not long for this world.

Then hurricane Helene hit, and Michael and I struck up a correspondence and began exchanging poems and offering one another feedback fairly regularly throughout that surreal season of upheaval, compounded for him by Colleen's decline and for me by my commute here to Virginia Tech. My daughter and I attended Colleen's memorial in January 2025, and, a few weeks later, Michael and I had a three hour conversation over coffee during which I learned that Colleen's death was far from the first loss he had suffered. He had also lost a girlfriend, his first child, his father under extreme circumstances, and then his mother and brother as well. And yet here he was continuing to make these exquisitely beautiful poems. It was this combination of having endured enormous loss and persisted in making art that earned Michael a place in my personal canon, and I’m so grateful for his friendship.

Last year, when A Sharper Silence came out, I read it in one breathless sitting over a glass of wine outside at the Blacksburg Tavern just down the street and promptly bought a half a dozen copies to give to everyone I knew who would appreciate it. I also knew I would love to have him here if possible, and here we are. Please join me in welcoming Michael.

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Michael Hettich

Thank you so much for that. I hope that is recording because I wanna keep that. I wanna have that. That was beautiful. Thank you so much.

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BW

‍So this is a model we've used before. Ed [Falco, here with us tonight] invented it. I'm going to ask Michael to read a poem and answer a question or vice versa, and we'll sort of take it from there if that sounds alright.

A Sharper Silence opens with a proem titled “The Secret,” a poem that reads almost like the recounting of a dream, but also tracks as a straightforward narrative. Could you please read “The Secret” and talk about why you chose it to open this collection and maybe how it serves as an introduction to and an and an encapsulation of what follows?

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MH

Okay. Good. Thank you.

The Secret

I’m running through the snow, carrying an injured crow
like a baby in my arms, trying not to fall 
in the unplowed road, and hoping he doesn’t try
to fly away again, bursting from my arms
to fall into the snow and start flailing, then falling
quiet. I think I’ll be able to help him 
when I get there, but I don’t know how. I don’t like 
touching wild things, hurt things, but here I am,
and my jacket’s all bloody. I’m certain my house
is just up the hill, and I know my wife is waiting there
with coffee and a blazing fire. She laughs when I go out
these frigid early mornings, to wade through the fresh snow
and she laughs when I return. I tell her I love
silence and the cold, after sleeping inside her
warmth as I have done for so many years 
I barely remember any other kind of sleeping, 
how it would feel now to dream alone,
or how it would stun me to wake up without 
her breathing beside me. I tell her these things, 
but really I’m searching for something like this darkness 
I am carrying now, something I can heal,
or pretend to. And if this animal is dead 
by the time I arrive—which I think it will be--- 
at least I’ll have his blood on me, at least I’ll have his feathers
to keep on the bookcase and remind me who I am—
and if she’s still sleeping by the time I arrive
maybe I’ll keep this black bird a secret
after all. I’ll bury him in the garden, in the snow,
and let her discover his body, in spring
when the snow melts enough to plant flowers.

I apologize for kinda screwing up some of the lines in that one. It's a hard poem to read. I'm not sure why because it's a pretty straightforward poem in terms of the cadences, but I always find I stumble on it in reading it. Now that poem, to my mind, is much more similar to poems from my earlier writing. In my early days of writing, I think I used a lot of what used to be called “magical realism.” I guess it still is. Not that this is magical realism, but my poems often had a sort of a folktale feeling to them that allowed me both to hide behind what I was trying to say, feel safe back there, and say it at the same time. Cesar Vallejo was my one of my first really, really deep influences. So I feel like this poem does that a little bit, but it's also a poem that’s different from the way I wrote the other poems in the book. And it's more similar again to the ways I used to write. That is to say, it's a poem I just jumped into and followed to the end. You know? And I think another thing that's different about it is that a poem like that for me, the landscape of the poem only comes to imagination as I write the poem. Whereas many of my other poems would be set in a place I know, and I see that place in writing the poem.

Here instead, it's more like the whole experience is coming, and I'm seeing what's going on as I write it and as I read it actually now too. What I notice as I read it now is that a lot of what it says is kind of troubling to me. It says, the poem says, the speaker says, I need this darkness with me to carry with me. I don't know where to go with that, what to say about that. I just know that it works in the poem, and I also know that I don't need to analyze what my own poem is saying. So I trust it.

The reason I put it as the first poem is well, actually, the poem showed me the book. What I mean by that is that I knew what the book was. Basically this book was started when my new and selected poems came out, or when I sent it to the publisher 2022, and it ended when Colleen died. I mean, that was the closure of the book. All the poems except one were written during that time. So I knew what the poems were, and I knew where it was going. And I also knew that I was gonna start with less sort of…what would I say? Less immediate poems and move toward more immediate poems to kind of follow the movement of our experience. But when I found that I could put that poem as the very first because—as you know, if you write poems—you know that that poem, if you read this book, doesn't fit in the book. I mean, you couldn't put it anywhere else in the book, I don't think, and have it work. I could jam it in somewhere, and it wouldn't work at all. But when I realized I could put it in as a proem, then you had the rest of the book. It kind of made me realize that's what the book is. This is the book. This is an opening to the book. It's more like an opening than it is like a participant in the book. It opens the landscape in a way even though that landscape is quite different as the book unfolds. Does that make sense?

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BW

Thank you so much. I'm going to try to speak as little as possible apart from the questions mostly so that we have more time to hear the poems and to hear Michael.

A little into the first of the book's six sections, there's another poem called “Certain Secrets” whose title echoes the first. In it there are a couple of lines in the interrogative. “How many years did we search to find our lives? How many years do we have before we leave?” Could you please read “Certain Secrets” and talk about the role this kind of questioning plays in your life and in your work?

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MH

Okay.

Certain Secrets

The names we’ve never spoken, that define us to ourselves
like the rhythm of a river caught inside a stone
smoothed by that river, as it falls toward the sea. 

*

In some other life, I wove grasses and lay down.
In some other life I made a nest and slept,
dreaming like a river, as it slides toward the sea.

*

How many years did we search to find our lives?
How many years do we have before we leave?
The singing of a river as it falls toward the sea

*

is a mind without thoughts, pure being, like the breeze
that wakes in your attic, or underneath your bed
and stirs up the dust, while you’re thinking of the sea

*

and hugging your wife, who’s dreaming in a language
that doesn’t have words yet, and gleams in her eyes 
when she wakes in your arms, smelling faintly of the sea

*

and sunlight in the breeze as it moves through the bedroom
then back out the window, like life itself must leave
the body that held it, or a wave far out at sea. 

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MH

So that one is another one I don't read very often because I just don't. I don't know why. You know, you do a book and you tend to go back to the ones you felt kind of worked for the audience when you read them. I like the formal quality of that poem. But I think one of the things about the poem I like—and I also like that question—is that one of the things I love about poetry is it raises questions but doesn't answer them. We don't have to have the answers. We have the questions, and that gives us something deep and sometimes more satisfying than the answers. We were just talking when we ate dinner. We were briefly talking about the new book by Michael Pollan in which he raises this question, what is consciousness? Can we come to some fuller understanding of consciousness? And as the book unfolds, it gets less interesting. I don't really like what the scientists and academics are telling me is consciousness. I wanna open up to the question of what is it. But I also feel that I don't know. That mystery of how long did we have it? How did we get here? How did we come here? And we came here through all these ancestors passing themselves onto us. And that to me is just a wonderful kind of almost a metaphor for what I wanna try to do in poetry, which is take the fire that was passed from one poet to another one, one shaman to another, over thirty five thousand years ago and has continued going, that fire. I wanna try to take that fire in some way and pass it on to another person. So we do that by asking the questions, not by answering them is my sense of things. I mean, we can let religion answer the questions. We can raise them, or we can we can live them.

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BW

I think in describing Pollan's approach, I'm reminded, I think we both read earlier in the year, Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art, which is a poet's approach to understanding consciousness, which stands in stark contrast to the scientist’s.

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MH

I'm not trying to say something bad about Michael Pollan. I like Michael Pollan.

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BW

‍We love Michael Pollan.

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MH

‍Yeah. Yeah. We like him. But I was disappointed. It made me realize that I wanted a chapter on how poets think of consciousness. You know? How dancers think of consciousness, not necessarily only how academics or scientists think of consciousness. That's really what it was, really how I felt about it. And that's what I think we're doing in poetry. Coming up with questions that resonate.

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BW

‍I would be hard pressed to choose favorites, but there's a poem in the book's second section called “The Angels” that's right up there. I think it appeared on Poetry Daily. Or actually poets.org. It was the Academy of Poets, whichever one that is. And a friend of mine who didn't know I knew you…

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MH

‍That's cool.

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BW

…forwarded it to me without comment, knowing it would cut me to the quick, as it did.

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MH

Thank you. I mean, when that happens, you gotta be happy. I mean right?

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BW

So could you please read “The Angels” and talk about it a bit? Maybe about the imagery of blackbirds and Colleen's laughter, which appear here as well as the opening poem and about how such darkness and radiance can coexist or coexist for you?

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MH

Okay. I think with this one, I might talk about it before I read it because there are things about it that might if I tell you, maybe the poem will sing better when you hear it in the ear. Well, what I'm thinking about in this poem are two or three things. And one of them was my own experience when I when I was about 24 or so, I moved to Colorado from the East. And I was kind of…I don't know if the word tormented would be the right word…but I was very confused and all over the place. And one of the things that I did often was I went to the mountains by myself and camped. But I didn't know how to camp. I was an eastern guy, and I just didn't. I would camp next to a creek at 10,000 feet and I'd freeze my butt off. And I had Rilke. I was reading Rilke and it was an intense experience and time. So that is in the poem. I think I had a lot of, you know…baggage, for lack of a better word…to work out, and I was kind of haunted by those things. So that's in there. And then also braided in there in a conversational way, at least I think of it as conversation, is the fact that Colleen's also in there. I'm in there as a child and a young man, and she's in there as her later self. We had lost our first child, and it was devastating. But this was maybe five or six years after the first part. Maybe I'm telling you too much. Let me tell you this, and then I'll read the poem. We lost our first child, and that was devastating. And that's in there. I'm not gonna talk much more about it. Let me just read the poem. And one other thing to say. Colleen was open to all sorts of other ways of thinking about what the world is made up of. She loved astrology. She wasn't an astrologer, but she was open to it. You know? When we met each other, I was very much like, no. She opened me to these things. And so when she says at the end the thing about angels, it's not necessarily that she's joking even though she laughs to kind of show me that, you know, I can take it however I want it, if that makes sense. So then here it goes. Oh, and well, I guess there's more to it. It’s better to talk about it afterwards, I guess.

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The Angels

As the day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel 
the people we’d loved and lost calling 
like a breeze that suggests itself but never 
actually awakens the trees. She told me 
again about the moment she decided to let 
our first child go so she could go on 
living herself, and I remembered 
how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself 
for a day, until I was lost and came 
to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning
to comfort our baby after we’d scattered
her ashes, and I remembered that the sun 
had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me 
with something as different from thought or song 
as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey, 
our lost child. And then I told her again 
that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed. 
Even when I stood up and gestured, there
in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away. 
I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go, 
so I lay down under stars so sharp 
in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even
when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds 
stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels, 
‍she said then and laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.

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MH

So I think it would have been better if we talked about it afterwards. But I don't know what else to say about it. It's just one of those poems that came--  Oh, I know what things to say about it. Here's a funny thing. Maybe not really relevant to the poem, but Campbell McGrath was the editor of the poem—the Academy of Poets thing, Poets Daily thing—that month. And so he asked me to send a bunch of poems. And I sent them, and I sent this one. And I said, I don't know. I'm not sure about this one. You know, the other ones I really like. This one, I'm not so sure of. And he was like, that was the one. So it's just interesting that you don't know often how to judge your own poems. And I often find that when I think a poem is good, I have a few trusted people I can send it to who tell me that maybe the next one will be better. You know what I mean? Like, it's almost always that. But it's great when it's one that you thought wasn't very good, and then you kinda see what it is. The other thing I also could say, and I think it's true for pretty much any poet or any fiction writers—I'm not a fiction writer. No. I don't think it's quite as true for fiction writers…  But, I mean, we move by intuition. You know what I mean? I feel the poem is kind of at a closing point, and that's where I stop it. And I go back and I look at it and I see how I can make all the parts kind of coherent in terms of the formal structure of the poem. You know, basically, that's what I do. I mean, once I get the lines where I want them and the word and the language to be sharp and taut, that's it. That's the poem. I feel like that's the poem. That's what’s really valuable about talking about the poems this way for me. It's really a gift. So I hope I'm not just rambling about them.

BW

No. This is perfect. And if you have additional questions (gesturing to the audience), if anybody wants to say anything, free to chime in.

One of my strategies—because I would, as I said, have a very hard time choosing otherwise—was just to select a poem from each of the sections. And I don't really have a question about how the sections themselves took shape, but you're welcome to speak to that. But we're on the third section now. And there are a couple of prose poems in this section in particular, including “Prayer Flags.” I'd love it if you read that, and perhaps talked a little bit about form, and/or about the limbo this poem refers to between waking and sleeping, knowledge and uncertainty, life and death.

MH

I'll read it first before I talk about it. It's pretty long. I never read prose poems at readings.

Prayer Flags

After her cancer scan, Colleen and I drive home in silence. It’s a beautiful spring day; the early flowers are singing to the bees and butterflies; the tomatoes are starting to blossom. I carry a cup of coffee and a book up to the garden and sit in the sun while she weeds and resonates with what she’s just gone through—radiation pulsed through her body—and marvels at the new growth springing up everywhere. She calls up occasionally. She’s found a pink lady-slipper orchid back behind the woodpile. She marvels at flowers whose name she doesn’t know bursting into blossom by the compost. As she wanders off, weeding her way down the slope, I sit mostly dozing in my own thoughts, dreaming that the prayer flags we’ve strung between trees up the hill behind me might actually carry healing winds down across our lives. When what sounds like soft snoring startles me awake, I open my eyes to see a bear standing not ten feet away, sniffing the ground as he moves across the garden. I recognize him as the male we’ve watched since he was a cub, two years ago now. We’ve watched his mother teach him how to climb trees and we’ve seen him knock over our garbage. I’m surprised he doesn’t see me here, or smell my various human perfumes. I can’t smell him either as I sit as still as possible, watching, alert but not afraid, though he could clearly kill me if he wanted to. When the hospital has posted the scan’s results this evening, we’ll learn whether Colleen’s cancer has grown, shrunk, or remained unchanged. Until then we move through a kind of limbo. This bear is just an adolescent, clumsy and hungry. I watch the way his coarse fur gleams in the sun, the way he walks—slightly pigeon-toed—and sniffs at a stump. When I put my book gently down in my lap, he wakes up to me, suddenly alert, as if, like me, he’s just been startled to awareness. He snorts and scampers up the hill and into the trees where we’ve draped those prayer flags. He leaves a faint puff of dust behind him. I get up and wander the garden, leaning to see if he left footprints behind, then call down to Colleen to tell her what I’ve seen. Soon we’ll go inside, open her computer and try to decipher her scans; for now we stand together in amazement under the darkening, late-afternoon sky.

 So that one is almost like a purely documentary poem of that experience.  I mean, that's pretty much exactly what happened. And I think what I was trying to get at is, again, that limbo period. You know, when someone is going through terminal cancer, stage four cancer, and they get a scan, and it takes the rest of the day to get the results. But your life is like, it's gonna be read in that scan. Has it shrunk? So in those moments in between, you're in a state of limbo. I mean, that's basically the best word I can give it. In this case, we had just hung these prayer flags up the slope behind our house, not because we thought they were actually gonna send us healing energy, but just as a way to make it beautiful around the place and the garden. And the bear came. I don't think of them as standing for anything except the wild, a wild creature, being right there and, amazingly, not that aware of me while I sat there quietly myself. So just the wonder of it, the wonder of the moment, I guess, is really what I'm trying to get at. And then I also think the kind of ordinary life that one goes back to living even while one's waiting for this kind of sentence of what your future will be. You know, she's weeding and looking at flowers and talking, and I'm kinda reading and going to sleep. It's kind of an ordinary day and an extraordinary day at once, as every day should be, but mostly they aren't.

BW

I’m reminded of Jane Kenyon's poem “Otherwise.”

In the fourth section, there's a poem called “A Kind of Happiness,” which speaks of relief and renewal and of a “small but authentic happiness.” Can you please read this and talk about the way such small pleasures lend themselves to poems and/or about how poems can be such small pleasures in and of themselves?

MH

A Kind of Happiness

It’s a relief of sorts to admit I’m a simple
fool when it comes to most practical matters,
balancing the checkbook, let’s say, or making
sure my phone is silenced when I’m
sitting in a concert. It’s a whole different kind
of relief to hear the wood frogs singing
at the mid-winter thaw, to wonder at the sheer
cacophony of voices, to try to sneak up
to their pond unnoticed and watch them thrash
in their mating. It feels like disappearing
then coming back renewed. Just yesterday, someone
was singing in the distance, down the hill, a woman
whose voice I didn’t recognize, though
I recognized the song she was singing, as she
walked off into silence. I sang it all day,
to myself, and it filled me with a kind of happiness,
small but authentic. I harmonized with her
as I moved the stones I had gathered, cradled
like babies in my arms, one after the other,
set them down beside each other,
and drew a new path through the garden.

MH

‍That's one I haven't read in any readings. I guess I think of the small pleasures as being kind of the spark of poems very often. I think of him in this way. How do you pronounce his name? Colm Tóibín, the Irish writer? He wrote an essay recently about his way of finding a novel and finding characters. He says something like, in one instance, I imagined a woman walking down the stairs and putting her arm on the banister. And the way she put that arm on the banister gave me the whole image of who this character was. And I don't think small pleasures operate in exactly that way, but I think often the small pleasure sparks the response that leads to other kinds of unfoldings. I find that the small pleasures actually might lead us, lead me, in interesting directions more than, let's say, starting with grief. I would rarely start a poem in grief. I would more likely start the poem in joy or pleasure and let that take me where it goes. And if it takes me there, that's where it goes. But I just find those joys are the sparks. And what else does this poem say? There's something…well, just also the pleasure of living with attention to what's going on around us. And I'm very, very bad at that. So when I wake up, it's like a poem. You know what I mean?  It's not like every day I'm sneaking up on the little frogs in the pond. But when I do, it's like, woah, baby. Now I got energy for writing. You know what I mean? And then I guess another thing about it is if I write something in the morning, which I do pretty much every day, and it's something that's got potential, or I feel like it has potential, I carry it around as a kind of small pleasure all day, until it either unfolds or doesn't go anywhere.

BW

That reminds me of the “crummy little things” video, which I've often shared. I taught a course called “Crummy Little Things” based on this little clip of Louise Glück in which she talks about having a new draft of a poem, and in it she says it's maybe just this crummy little thing. But I wake up in the morning, and my crummy little thing is there, and I have to go out and run an errand. And I know that when I get home, my crummy little thing will be there, and I'm going to sit on the sofa and curl up with my crummy little thing. And it's a crummy little thing, but it's my crummy little thing. The course’s subtitle was “On the Companionship of Creative Work,” the way that creative work keeps us company in the world.

MH

‍I wouldn’t call it “crummy,” but I really I do appreciate the small thing. This little small thing.

BW

‍I appreciate what you said, too, though, about not leading with grief because as we all know, there is no grief without love, without something to lose, without joy. If you're indifferent to your experience of the world, what do you have to lose or to grieve? And so unless you have that attachment or that joy…

MH

‍Yeah. But then, you know, right away, I'm thinking of all the contradictions to that. It's not always that way.

BW

‍Well, there are just two more in this collection that I'd like to talk about, and then I think we'll have a little bit of time for the new book. In the fifth section, there’s a beautiful love poem “Angels in the Trees.”  It begins with a wonderfully alliterative line: “my wife drapes her drying dresses…”  And I can almost imagine that a poem like this was born of the music in that line, but the poem's narrative content might also have been its impetus. Could you read “Angels in the Trees” and speak to what sparked this poem and also to your process more generally?

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MH

Angels in the Trees

My wife drapes her drying dresses across 
the mountain laurel branches; she forgets them 
all night, and in the morning, walking out, 

she thinks for a moment she sees a choir 
of angels standing at the edge of the woods, 
watching her. But it’s only her dresses, 
full of dew, and smelling clean as snow. 

Her most beautiful dress hangs deeper in the woods, 
higher in the branches. We wonder how it got there

as I prop a ladder inside the flurry 
of twigs and leaves, climb up and carefully
carry it down. It’s covered now

in tiny inch worms, so we hang it in the sun 
and watch them slip to the ground on their strands 
of glinting filament. Then she puts it on, 

this dress I 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, as she walks around the garden
smiling at the new flowers, barefoot in the sun.

MH

‍This one, this is the only poem in the book that was not written in that period between 2022 and '25. This poem was a prose poem in my New and Selected. I had it as a prose poem, and it didn't work. But for some reason I liked it enough to put it in the in the New and Selected. But I guess one day I just saw it and I said, that's not the poem. I mean, the poem needs to be lined. So I reworked it. So in a way, it is a new poem for this book. Lineation makes it very different. It's another one that starts with an actual experience and then moves into the unknown. I don't really remember whether the dress actually went up in the tree. I think it might have been a regular mountain laurel. But the rest of it is pretty much just drawn from our lives together.

BW

‍I was thinking about the music in that first line and the language itself and wondering how often perhaps your work begins with a line, a line made of words such as “she drapes her drying dresses.”

MH

‍If I find a line, if I get a line like that, I'm usually gonna try to go as far as I can with it. You know what I mean? And I often start with lines. I'm sure you do too. I mean, we do. We start with lines. And then if the line is sufficiently interesting and has enough potency, it can take us someplace. It’s interesting to me. I don't know if it's interesting to everybody else that this started out as a prose poem, and I don't remember whether I had that line written that way in the prose poem. It doesn't feel like a prose poem transposed into a lined poem at all to me.

BW

‍There’s just one more poem I'd like to talk about from this book so that we have a little time left for the other. I'd love it if you would read “First Light.” It includes the lines “if joy is that feeling of throwing oneself into the moment without thinking, just losing yourself for a while,” and also “the beauty I yearn for will come back despite me.” And finally, “somehow it sing, It sings in us still.”  I'd love to hear your thoughts about this conception of joy and the persistence of beauty and of singing in the face of grief and loss and about what keeps you going these days.

MH

First Light

         —Hurricane Helene, September 27, 2024

1.

As I walk to the kitchen in the pre-dawn light,
I glance out the window: dark forms etched in darkness

out by the compost, just far enough away
I can’t tell at first if they’re really there.

I lean closer, squinting. Shapes tumble and lie still,    
wrestling and eating the scraps I dumped last night: 

a family of bears—momma  and three almost
full-grown cubs. So I step out, half-dressed 

and still half-asleep. There’s a garden wall between us 
and I’m hardly a threat, skinny old half-naked

human that I am. I walk out into the chilly dawn 
holding my breath, doing my best 

to disappear. But of course they sense me anyway, 
right away, and bound off through the trees 

with what looks like joy, if joy is that feeling 
of throwing oneself into the moment without thinking, 

just losing yourself  for a while. Last night 

before we turned off the light, I rubbed 
Colleen’s shoulders and back with a lotion 

that sometimes relieves her pain. As I rubbed 
and sang softly, mostly to myself, 

I could feel how her delicate bones worked to hold her 
together, how fragile that scaffolding is, 

and I tried to work deeper—to give her some relief, 
which is almost impossible now. 

All day I’d been moving branches and stones 
the big storm scattered, soothing the wounds

the fallen trees left, as though I could make things 
beautiful again with my human puttering. 

The beauty I yearn for will come back despite me.
I pull another root ball off the path and feel 

my wife’s small bones beneath my fingers. 

2.

The little creek we love, that runs along the edge 
of our property, has vanished under rubble,

though farther down the mountain it emerges again,   
singing with the same voice it had before the storm, 

at least to my ears, though maybe I’m not listening
carefully enough, since the path it sings 

has changed so dramatically, and all the little creatures—
salamanders, mud-puppies, and the nameless ones too—

were buried in the landslide. 

Most likely my ears just aren’t built to hear 
the different voices in the water as it falls 

from darkness into daylight, falls toward the bigger creeks 
and rivers, on into the manmade lakes 

of this region, then on toward the ocean, the pulse 
of tides more ancient than mountains or rivers 

or even life itself as we know it, though somehow 
it sings, it sings in us still.

MH

‍That poem definitely came from me getting up and seeing those bears and then kind of coming back to a certain way of feeling the possibility of joy, at that time when it was getting very difficult. I mean, my wife, Colleen, was in constant pain, and it was very hard to relieve it at all. So that was where I was. And then to wake up and look out and see these shapes and to look a little harder and to see these bears and to see the vividness of their lives as they moved off back into the darkness and also to have the landscape of hurricane Helene still so present around us because this was, you know, January 2025. Trees were still down all around my property, and it just felt like unrelenting destruction and loss and sadness and then to have this joy come, to see this joyous movement of the bears, whether it was joyous or not, it looked joyous to me, and to lose oneself in that. And I do think that what joy is is losing oneself for a period of time, and then coming back to oneself and recognizing that loss. If you just lost yourself permanently, it wouldn't be a particular joy. You gotta come back. You know what I mean? And also the sun was coming up, and it sings and all these things sing in us still. It just felt like an affirmative kind of a poem and it fit the end of the book.  It's the next to last poem in the book. So it's getting chilly out and, it was probably December or November then. So, yeah, that's it.

BW

‍I'll just share a few words of yours about the new book, and then you can share a few words. You've said of Waking Up Alone, the collection that follows A Sharper Silence, that it came very quickly, and you, this is a quotation, “tried to resist the impulse to revise it over much” because you “felt that there was something in the rawness of the language that conveyed the emotions you were trying to express more fully than formally balanced poems would have been able to do.” And you also said that “to make the poems more formally graceful would have felt like a kind of lying.” Can you please read us any short sample from Waking Up Alone, which primarily hinges on one long poem.

MH

‍The main poem is about 40, maybe 45 pages, 40 or so. And just to reiterate what you just said, I wrote it in a month. The whole book was done in a month, and it was one of those times when I was so grateful I had some place to go. Some place just to put my mind, put my energy in those dark hours between people coming in and, you know, just in that time. I think I said “over much” there, but I don't think I revised it at all except to cut out a few things.

BW

‍So that's the last part of my question.  Maybe you could talk about this kind of immediacy compared with your revision practice more typically and maybe about the relationship between authenticity and grace?

MH

‍I mean, normally, I revise quite a lot. And I believe in revision, and I believe that what you experience in revision is the next level of imagination, and you can keep on building. But in this case, it would have falsified something, I believed, because it would soften things. I would have fixed things. Like, the thing about this book is when people read it, when I give it to people or people buy it, I want to say that it’s not really like my other work. Normally, I wouldn't be so rough. It’s just so different. It feels different. But it just wouldn't have worked, I mean, to revise. Let me just read part of it.  It's a very hard poem to read from because it doesn't have any titles. So here we go:

There’s no language that can take me
where I need to go.
No body, no dream, no hallucination.
I am breathing through a hollow blade of grass. I am falling
for what seems like years through the sky, but the sky
is only my mind in a dream. Let me go
‍I beg myself again, like a wave.

Every time we breathe, our lungs fill with dust.

I am searching for a different kind of person than myself
‍like a wind that doesn’t move; it’s full of what we’ve thought
again and again without knowing. 
         Always
the same sort of cut in the fabric, the pelt.

*

How do I grasp who I am now and make it larger,
able to hold you here with me 
for as long as I live? 
Then we waded out 
through a slow-moving creek, sandy bottom, through the grasses 
and flowers whose names we didn’t know.

I wish I could remember what we said as we leaned
to look into that clear water at the translucent minnows 
who wanted to taste us, who darted then returned 
when we stood still. That’s the kind of stillness 

I need now. 
The door has never opened, the window
has vanished from the wall, the sky is now a solid thing 
above me, now a kind of gaping hole  

in the fabric of nothing. Not nothing. 
I want to cuddle up 
beside her, breathing. I want to stand in that river. 

The grain in the wood she sanded to make a bench
or the stand for the ceramic vase we bought 
for our final anniversary.

She built it from scrap wood in a single afternoon.

The trick is, the truth is, keep looking, take nothing
for granted. 
Don’t live 
in a daze of expectation.

I’ve bought a bonsai tree to care for and admire.
It calls for my daily attention. 
Outside, the winter birds come. 

Down slope, the little pool sings with wood frogs.
You keep walking through the rooms, standing at the edge of sight
then stepping in to disappear. I reach out to touch you... 

*

Sometimes I’m smaller than a nut, 
more shallow than a puddle. She was that way too
but at least she was honest about it. 

She loved silly TV shows; she refused to watch violence.

She wanted to watch people dance and laugh,
which we didn’t do enough of, which is one of my regrets.

She loved to swim out beyond the waves, onto sand bars 
in the subtropic sun; she loved the heat of summer. 

She was happy to ride her clunky bike 
in the full sun without a hat. Even in the desert
where the snakes and lizards took shelter under rocks

she turned her face to the sun.

*

I was riding down a river in a small boat,
past houses and docks where people stood waving.

I didn’t have to paddle or steer, the boat
just followed the current, and the current felt fine
beneath me, inside me. I looked at the towns
we passed: I might see someone I knew.
A black dog was barking; he started to swim out

but was called back by a little boy fishing from a rock. 
There were picture book clouds in the sky
and my body felt transparent in the best way; I knew
I had a body, this me, but it felt somehow separate
from me, somehow other. This is who I am now
‍I thought and was flooded with relief. 
I saw my parents waving from a dock, 
smiling, my brother and sister, still children,
and then I saw her, my love, wading out
toward me holding her clothes above her head,
her blue eyes, her cheekbones, her long hair, her voice.
But I couldn’t stop the boat, couldn’t turn it her way
as she fell behind; she was breathing too hard 
to call out. I should have jumped in and swum toward her.  
But I waited. I waited too long. 

*

A crack of light seeps through the wall and I realize
our house is falling away.

A leak starts to make its way underneath the shingles
and I realize again what I know and try
to ignore. The little house she fixed-up will soon need repairs. 

I think I’ll try to learn how to look with her eyes, 
how to move with her body and fix things the way
she would have fixed them.

*

I hear something moving through the trees, and I love you, my darling.
I stand up without you to face whatever comes.

Thank you all.

BW

‍Thank you so much, Michael, and thank you all for being here.