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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam

Anne Michaels

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Leave
Full
Love
Starving
Mouths
Dead

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History is the gradual instant
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The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
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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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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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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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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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The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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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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...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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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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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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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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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.
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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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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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History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
Anne Michaels
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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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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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The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
Anne Michaels