Quote

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.

Anne Michaels

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Poetry
Hollow
Pure
Orchestra
Dervish
Lines
Awkward
Plaintive
Call
Achieved
Shriek
Wanted
Poem
Shrieking
Even
Rain
Wail
Whose
Reed
Line
Reeds

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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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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 a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
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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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History is the gradual instant
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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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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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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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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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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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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.
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Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your 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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I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
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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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Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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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 best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
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