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There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

Anne Michaels

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
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Moments
Loss
Contemplated
Firsts
Sleep
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First
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Sleeping
Children
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Grief
Time
Death
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Love
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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
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Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.
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Trees for example, carry the memory of rainfal. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.
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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.
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I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
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I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.
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History is the gradual instant
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It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
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Like other ghosts, she whispers not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.
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I see that I must give what I most need.
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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.
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When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know - you can only hope - that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labor of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely.
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When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
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Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.
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When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.
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Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.
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Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Anne Michaels