Anne Michaels Quote

Last Night’s Moon,When will we next walk togetherunder last night’s moon? - Tu FuMarch aspens, mist forest. Green rain pins down the sea, early eveningcyanotype. Silver saltlines, weedytoques of low tide, pillow lava’s black spill indeliblein the sand. Unbrokenbroken sea.—Rain sharpens marsh-hairbirth-green of the spring firs.In the bog where the dead never disappear,where river birch drown, the surfacestrewn with reflection. This is the acid-soakedmoss that eats bones, keeps flesh;the fermented ground where time stops and doesn’t; dissolves the skull, preserves the brain, wrinkled pearl in black mud.—In the autumn that made love necessary, we stood in rubber bootson the sphagnum raft and learnedlove is soil–stronger than peat or sea–melting what it holds.The pastis not our own. Mole’s ribbon of earth,termite house,soaked sponge. It rises, keloids of rain on wood; spreads, milkweed galaxy, broken podscattering the debris of attention.Where you arewhile your body is here, rememberingin the cold spring afternoon.The pastis a long bone.—Time is like the painter’s lie, no linearound apple or along thigh, though the appleaches to its sweet edge, strains to its skin, the seam of density. Invisible lineclosest to touch. Lines of wet grasson my arm, your tongue’s wet line across my back.All the history in the bone-embedded hillsof your body. Everything your mouthremembers. Your hands manipullate in the darkness, silver bromideof desire darkening skin with light.—Disoriented at great depths,confused by the noise of shipping routes,whales hover, small eyes squinting as they consultthe magnetic map of the ocean floor. They strain,a thousand miles through cold channels;clicking thrums of distant lonelinessbounce off seamounts and abyssal plains. They look up from perpetual dusk to rods of sunlight,a solar forest at the surface. Transfixed in the dark summerkitchen: feet bare on humidlinoleum, cilia listening. Feral as the infrared aura of the snake’s prey, the bees’pointillism, the infrasonichum of the desert heard by the birds.The nighthawk spans the ceiling;swoops. Hot kitchen air