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New and On View: Mudlark Poster No. 34 (2001) Michael Hettich | The Moon Beneath The House Contents Rope | The Months We Lived Alone For Years Attributes of Love | Espresso | Our Father Certain Trees | Yearning To Be Beautiful Light | When Michael Hettich's book A SMALL BOAT was published by the University Press of Florida (1990). His most recent chapbooks are SLEEPING WITH THE LIGHTS ON from Pudding House Publications and MANY SIMPLE THINGS (1997) and IMMACULATE BRIGHT ROOMS (1994) from March Street Press. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Miami-Date Community College. from The Moon Beneath The House Our Father wanted to taste the milk of every species of mammal in North America because he believed our human trace started in milk, and because he loved breasts. After that, he hoped to make a journey collecting eggs, not only bird but lizard, spider, insect eggs as well, to taste them, moving ever lower on the great chain until he understood the diversity and subtle textures of life on this continent with knowledge he carried on the tongue and in the blood. He walked everywhere, and he slept outside most nights. He believed that if he learned to focus well enough he would eventually be able to tell the size of a field with his eyes shut, to be able to smell what mammals lived in a forest and how many different species of tree lived there too. He wanted to fashion a language that incorporated barks and purrings of all the wild creatures he encountered so maybe a more nearly universal language might be sung, at least in some rudimentary form, and he tried to move exactly like certain wild creatures, to make only their sounds for days, to sleep in the positions he'd observed them sleeping, to hide the way they had, to vanish the way they did. Eventually he'd learn to fly, to breathe underwater, to live without thinking as a human. And then he'd move on to trees and flowers, on to wind and silence. Spread the word. Far and wide... William Slaughter MUDLARK An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics Never in and never out of print... E-mail: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.unf.edu/mudlark