Anne Michaels Quote

—If love wants you; if you’ve been melteddown to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm bloodand cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to breathe with the spiralcalls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waes. You’ll tryto haul your weight from simple seato gravity of land. Caught by the tide,in the snail-slip of your own path, for momentssuffocating in both water and air. If love wants you, suddently your past is obsolete science. Old maps,disproved theories, a diorama.The moment our bodies are set to spring open.The immanence that reassembles matter passes through us then dispersesinto time and place:the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons.The mother who hears her child crying upstairsand suddenly feels her dress wet with milk.Among black branches, oyster-coloured fogtongues every corner of loneliness we never knewbefore we were loved there,the places left fallow when we’re born,waiting for experience to find its wayinto us. The night crossing, on deckin the dark car. On the beach wehre night reshaped your face.In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet,moss like velvet spread over splintered forms.The instant spray freezesin air above the falls, a gasp of ice. We rise, hearing our namescalled home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moonan escutcheon on the shield of sky.The current that passes through us, radio waves,electric lick. The billions of photons that passthrough film emulsion every second, the single submicroscopic crystal struck that becomes the phograph.We look and suddenly the world looks back. A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky.—But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate by the rear-view mirrorof the moon; if we continue to reachboth for salt and for the sweet whitenibs of grass growing closest to earth;if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re alsodriving through the canyon at night, all around us the hidden glow of limestoneerased by darkness; if still we sish we’d waited for morning,we will know ourselvesnowhere.Not in the mirrors of wavesor in the corrading stream,not in the wavering glass of an apartment building,not in the looming light of night lobbiesor on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchenor in the motel where we watched meteorsfrom our bed while your slow film, the shutter open,turned stars to rain.We will becomeindigestible. Afraid of choking on furand armour, animalswill refuse the divided longingsin our foreing blue flesh.—In your hands, all you’ve lost,all you’ve touched. In the angle of your head,every vow andbroken vow. In your skin,every time you were disregarded,every time you were received.Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field,mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem.The branch that’s released when the bird lifts