Mudlark Poster No. 15 (1998)
Michael Hettich
The Point of Touching
Moving Bodies
Michael Hettich's book A Small Boat was published by the University Press of Florida (1990). His most recent chapbooks are from March Street Press: Many Simple Things (1997) and Immaculate Bright Rooms (1994). Hettich is starting up a small environmental magazine called Earth Literacy Link that he will be editing. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Miami-Date Community College. E-mail: mhettich@mdc.edu.
One night, long after the children and I had fallen asleep, my wife lit candles in every room of our house, took off her clothes, and went outside, naked, to sketch charcoal impressions of the candle-glowing house full of sleepers and light she loved. And then she took a scissors and cut a lock of hair from each of us--me, our children, herself--and buried our hair at the drip line of our gumbo-limbo tree. She played her cello then, in our candle-lit living room, until dawn yawned at the windows, and then she blew out the candles, came to bed, and slept like a leaf flowing down stream, and slept like words in some forgotten language. When she woke, at noon, there was no one home to talk to, so she never told us anything--except in the way she touched me anywhere that evening, the way she kisses me some nights: with a yearning that makes me stop growing older for a few moments, reverses the direction of my blood, yes, and makes me glow. And that's the point of touching, isn't it? To make our bodies real? And things like that are sometimes closer than the world, closer than our words, closer even than ourselves. So other nights I stay up beyond anyone, pacing the sidewalk like the good husband I am, back and forth, back and forth--until I finally wear away and vanish, like light itself, like life, or like fragrance from the drowsy flowers growing taller and hairy around our gumbo-limbo tree.
There's no one else home, so you walk around your large house from room to room and around again, touching familiar objects, touching yourself, humming, thinking thoughts that disappear as soon as you think them. Your body feels well-muscled and sleek under your new clothes, and you think about that, too, as you walk around, think about how strange and distant your body sometimes seems to you, how deeply its functions fascinate even as they distance you from it, your body, the only ground you're sure your self knows, if indeed it knows anything at all. And right now in a distant city, in an office at the top of a glinting skyscraper, a woman you wouldn't even recognize remembers how you danced one mid-winter afternoon, by yourself in the middle of a waxed gymnasium floor, to the Spanish music from the janitor's transistor radio, how you twirled and smiled and then looked across the gym at her, suddenly embarrassed, turned and walked away. And she looks out her window, down across the city, and she sees you clearly, the way you turned away, and she feels again the urge to run after you, to grab your arm, to ask you please to dance with her. And even as she thinks of you, whose name she's probably never known, you hear a salza melody, you start dancing in your living room.