Michael Hettich At Vizcaya 2017

Vizcaya Museum & Gardens (Photo by JW Bailly CC BY 4.0)

A Fabled Magnificence: Old Europe in the Mangroves
By Michael Hettich

The strangeness of the landscape, like a new kind of window
for the lonely man from Chicago, who hated
heat, and sweat, and bright sun, but loved

the dream of old Europe, cherubs, expensive delicate ships, like the caravel that hangs from the ceiling of the loggia, looking out at a stone ship that looks out across the bay teeming with crocodiles and crabs, mosquitoes by the billions—

Telegram:

HOUSE HERE WITHOUT MOSQUITO SCREENS UNTHINKABLE IN SUMMER UNCOMFORTABLE ALWAYS IN WINTER UNBEARABLE AT TIMES WORSE IF POSSIBLE FROM FLIES VERY BAD NOW

Heavy-handed paintings of the European past
in a house built to mimic the European past—
as if the family had lived here for centuries– in these raw subtropics, where just up to road

Ralph Munroe’s Barnacle caught breezes off the bay where freshwater springs bubbled up into the salt and white birds were hunted for their plumes while here

at Vizcaya the baths ran both salt and fresh water
and a secret door leads to a room-sized painting
of shipwrecks and wilderness—conjuring a mood more important than showing the real world—seahorse
weathervanes, drapery and chandeliers.

How
can I see this place in a sympathetic light,
this rich man’s indulgence in retrograde taste
at a time when the whole world was being so vividly
re-imagined—Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce
to say nothing of the Great War—

Where are we when we’re here?

Coral stone walls beside a lagoon—

bottle caps and rose petals strewn on the stairs

and the climate takes it all, as the rising seas
will soon take it all: a hurricane stink
by the mangroves, beyond which the wedding parties sweat
and smile like ads for their portraits.

Panthers and bears. Indigo snakes. Butterflies. dogs, monkeys, spiders and iguanas Tree snails. Migrating birds by the millions:

Snow geese, peregrine falcons, mangrove
cuckoos, yellow-billed cuckoos, yellow-bellied
sapsuckers, sparrows, warblers, wrens
shrikes, terns grebes, orchard
orioles, wigeons, hummingbirds, ibises
herons, egrets flamingos—
willets
and sandpipers, mocking birds, mourning doves, and crows–

hawks and pelicans, roseate spoonbills,
huge white pelicans floating just offshore

A stunning swimming pool no one ever swam in.
Ceilings as impressive as any in the world,

the idea of elegance as a kind of looking backward.

an environment suggestive of a dream.

Sink hole coral rock limestone lagoon.

A mangrove forest teeming with spawn in its dappled dusk light. Manatees and dolphins. Aligator bellowing punctuates the nights. The subtropic lushness: a pelt of sweaty perfume:

redberry stopper
maidenhair fern–

Gardens for flowers unsuited to the climate
A pretty little room for arranging bouquets.

Workers with their shirts off melting in the weighted sun.

Hurricanes poised at the horizon. Great
thunderstorms every summer afternoon.

To create the past in a brand-new city.

A frigate bird circles toward the vultures overhead

as an osprey whistles from a slash pine, then leaps

out, leaps out into unencumbered air—

Michael Hettich has published over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently Systems of Vanishing (2014), The Animals Beyond Us (2011) and Like Happiness (2010). A new book, The Frozen Harbor, was published this past summer. His work has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly and Poetry East. He has collaborated widely with visual artists, musicians and fellow writers. Systems of Vanishing won the 2014 Tampa Review Prize and The Frozen Harbor won the David Martinson/Meadowhawk Prize. Hettich has also been awarded three Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs.

This poem was debuted at the FIU Honors College‘s “Poetry Art Community” at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens on 14 November, 2017.

The Vizcaya Poems
Richard Blanco
Michael Hettich
Caridad Moro-Gronlier
Nikki Moustaki-Brandt
Carlos Pintado

BACK TO POETRY ART COMMUNITY FALL 2017 AT VIZCAYA

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