Anne Michaels - Tumblr Posts
Anne Michaels, from Skin Divers; “Skin Divers”
[Text ID: “Like the moon, I want / to touch places / just by looking.”]
There are so many ways the dead show us they are with us. Sometimes they stay deliberately absent, in order to prove themselves by returning. Sometimes they stay close and then leave in order to prove they were with us. Sometimes they bring a stag to a graveyard, a cardinal to a fence, a song on the wireless as soon as you turn it on. Sometimes they bring a snowfall.
Anne Michaels, "Held"
Places described by a lover are like no other places on earth. To learn a city this way–boulevards curving, canals, cornices overhead–in the naked embrace, the luxury of listening while your skin is listening. The city slips into your body. And then, if you are fortunate enough to arrive there for the first time with that same lover, or more fortunate still to arrive there after so many years with the same lover–then you will enter the place as if in a dream. Your body will recognise the canals, the cornices, the curving boulevards; memory before sight. And that is a great gift, because we arrive most often as strangers; this, of course, is its own pleasure. But this other pleasure–arrival into the memory of a place you've never been and yet know in your skin–is the same as arriving into love, that knowledge of something we do not yet know. The kind of love that is like a fatality. The one you never live beyond, no matter what else befalls you.
Anne Michaels, "Held"
Anne Michaels, from "A Height of Years", The Weight of Oranges
“The earliest gardens were walled not to keep out animals, but to keep them in, so they could not be hunted by strangers. The Persian word for these walled sanctuaries was pairidaeza, the Hebrew, pardes, in Greek, paradeiosos. […] The origin of the word ‘paradise’ is simply ‘enclosure.’”
— Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault
“Reading a poem in translation,“ wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil”; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.
– Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
“those moments between clothing and skin all and all you live without the place you cannot touch yourself the place between love and the dream of love”
— Anne Michaels, from Sea of Lanterns; All We Saw: Poems, 2017