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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
First
Forever
Sleeping
Children
Child
Recognize
Even
Anyone
Carry
Believe
Moment
Grief
Time
Death
Weight
Love
Makes
Whose
Like
Moments
Loss
Contemplated
Firsts
Sleep
Fugitive

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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
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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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History is the gradual instant
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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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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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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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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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History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
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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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The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.
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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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It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
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Important lessons: look carefully record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary find a way to make necessity beautiful.
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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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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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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'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
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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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