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If love wants you if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills with feathers and scales with warm blood and cold.

Anne Michaels

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Scales
Warm
Cold
Wants
Blood
Gills
Stars
Melted
Love
Feathers
Lungs

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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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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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When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
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Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
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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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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.
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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 see that I must give what I most need.
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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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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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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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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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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
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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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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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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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But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it's not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it's the world's brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.
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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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