ALL WE SAW
for John Berger
for Mark Strand
BOOKS BY ANNE MICHAELS
Fiction
Fugitive Pieces (1996)
The Winter Vault (2009)
Poetry
The Weight of Oranges (1986)
Miner’s Pond (1991)
The Weight of Oranges/Miner’s Pond (1997)
Skin Divers (1999)
Correspondences (with artwork by Bernice Eisenstein, 2013)
All We Saw (2017)
Theatre
Railtracks (with John Berger, 2011)
CONTENTS
Books by Anne Michaels
I. Sea of Lanterns
II. Somewhere Night Is Falling
III. Late August
Not
Black Sea
Five Islands
Hyphen
IV. Bison
V. To Write
A Soul Spreads Across the Sky
There Was a Distant Sound
I Dreamed Again
Before Us
You Meet the Gaze of a Flower
Ask Aloud
VI. All We Saw
Acknowledgements
I
SEA OF LANTERNS
between your touch
and my cry
between the sea
and the dream of the sea
part her darkness with your tongue
still she remains hidden
silk drenched against skin
brine and oil the sea on platters
tables crowded glasses and bottles
a life your own left behind
a note in a hotel room
damp small of her back
rope of hair dripping
rain that tastes of an answer
the port draws us
across the folding dusk
gold against dark wool
a grasp of loosened hair
between the lit room
and the dark lagoon
trailing regret each step
tangled we come even those
who can’t move at all
those who have earned the right to speak
in absolutes
those who have nothing
to eat our fill at the empty table
each word a chemistry binding us
to particular endless
longings we take now as our own
the tormenting literature that names forever
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
fruit misshapen with sweetness and rot
the morbid mortal beauty
of this sonnet or that
words that taste of an answer
velvet lampshade gold fringe
waterstained wallpaper burgundy
bedcover a room so small
every movement means touching
felled by the rain,
we woke and thought it was night
words brought down
by blows, struck
to the depth
of flesh, of
haunting and naming
the first words uttered
from that silence
the silence where love emerges
sung by a ghost
who taught me my life was not my own
who taught me to take nothing
hurtling through the narrow pass
suspended along the cliff’s edge
a violent lurch, a wrenching
each choice obliterating another
to say the wrong thing
from exhaustion, to suffer for days
something forgotten
saturated with love
aching to make perfect
first lights of land
smear of lanterns in the fog
crates scraped against stones,
carried and dropped laughter and
blame in reply the endless ballad
of waves against embankment
entering centuries,
you lay on the palace floor
and looked up watching clouds open
the only sunlight that mid-winter day
in that painted ceiling
that first night I dreamed of a forest
I will never again wake with such peace
green darkness rain stitching roots
through earth
winter sweetness
of the barn, cold as underground
and what was bare and still
was full of movement snow darkened
with stars how much that hope
hurt and yet
purple dusk, yellow winter sky
we arrive again an innumerable
entering as if from another life
saved by a moment
standing in a doorway inconsolable
error avoided in an instant
everything spent and slipping through
as if at last we had it right, as if
unharmed
as if we had, as if we had not,
the light fell
what one age settles, another
shakes again, sediment
in the blood what the nape
remembers, pushed to the ground,
or the eyes, or the vitals
sweating awake, snowy morning,
black trees. the body leaps to be rid of itself,
or takes what it needs. the body
turns to its own explanation knowing
“I cannot live without you” and
“this too shall pass”
the lump in the throat
moving with each swallow
draw deep the oar into that blackness
nothing heavier than hewing the abyss
to stay afloat
the entire weight of the sea
pulled by a narrow blade
and no matter how deep the turning,
the scratch and salt of the stars remain
lanterns empty their light
into the water
where they are not
extinguished
each lamp sets fire to the sea,
igniting where it drowns
II
SOMEWHERE NIGHT IS FALLING
Somewhere night is falling
Somewhere a man stands outside a church
too bitter to enter, yet bound by doubt to that place
Somewhere a woman fills a glass with clear water
and flowers drink their last moments
in the last light of the fields
Somewhere a child stands next to a wall in the desert
Somewhere there is a house with a portrait of Beethoven
and a child who wonders if it is a picture of her grandfather
Somewhere there is a boy learning to wait
Somewhere, for the sake of his children, a man
writes what he has seen
Somewhere, for the sake of his children, a man
will not write what he has seen
Somewhere there is a son with the memory of a father’s
touch on his back, giving him courage
Somewhere a mother gives courage to thousands of
mourners at her son’s funeral
Somewhere a man measures the dimensions of the prison
precisely
Somewhere a woman plants a garden in front of the prison
Somewhere thousands stand where once
the square was empty
Somewhere a cave is lit by a torch
Somewhere there i
s man who walks beside us, without a
hat, in the rain
Somewhere a man reads a letter and folds it carefully
into his heart
Somewhere a man weeps for what he has found
Somewhere between Paris and London, a man peels an
orange on the train
Somewhere a man waits in a train station with the taste of
coffee on his palate
Somewhere a man waits in a city for a woman who
waits for him
Somewhere a man holds out his hand before we know
we need it
Somewhere there is a room lit only by a painting
as night falls
Somewhere there is a man who is not afraid to live in a
woman’s hope
Somewhere there is a man who has not forgotten anything
and has written it down
Somewhere there is someone so close to you, there are no
details
Somewhere a woman’s gift has not been deepened but
corrupted by loss
Somewhere there is a man who has given away everything
and stands in the rain, grateful
Somewhere the dead are leaving a sign
Somewhere there is a man who meets his late mother
in Lisbon
Somewhere a man makes soup for the village
Somewhere a man tells a woman she is not
as alone as she thinks and she understands
she is precisely as alone
Somewhere a man remembers a blue shirt left behind
forty years before
Somewhere a man inscribes the back of a photograph
and dates it twenty years before either of them
were born
Somewhere there is a painter carrying a spare egg
Somewhere there is a man driving away from
the marketplace with cages of unsold chicks
in the back seat of his Peugeot
Somewhere a woman stops for petrol, thousands of white
origami birds pressed against the car windows
Somewhere on the shoulder of the highway, not long
before he dies, a man opens the hatch of his truck and
shows a woman his paintings, all imaginings of her body,
how her skin feels against his mind
Somewhere a woman wakes in the night and knows
no one will ever write a poem for her
Somewhere a man answers courage with courage
Somewhere a man fights for nothing
Somewhere a man digs his own grave in the forest and waits
Somewhere a man builds the room where his child
will be conceived
Somewhere a man and a woman leave a note in the rafters
Somewhere a man and a woman leave the threat
outside the door in order to defeat it
Somewhere a man wonders how many thousands of years
men have lain with a woman
just this way
Somewhere a woman slips off her scarf without untying
the knot at her nape
Somewhere a man writes of that scarf
and the fist of the knot against his back
Somewhere rain is falling
Somewhere a man is repairing the night, one word at a time
Somewhere a man sends a message “spoken
before hands ever wrote”
Somewhere night is falling
III
LATE AUGUST
mountain a wimple starched folds
birds the black page turning
the message folded and unfolded
in that turning of the page
inside out, in that scarf
of shadow, in that message
passing
you wanted death to give
not only take from us
NOT
not will, not desire:
perhaps prayer
not still:
held
at the end you said:
I want to keep my eyes open,
to miss nothing
not entreaty, not regret
not future, not past:
touch and warm weight
breath and again:
what word can be heard
not loss, not absence:
perhaps soul
not inside, not outside:
dusk’s doorway
not alone
BLACK SEA
I could almost not bear to leave
your islands at the framer
so precious that paper
the work of your hands
you chose (3/4 inch) frames, (anti-fade) glass,
we wondered which wall might
hold them all, wooden frames and
glassy sea so heavy I could barely carry
the dusk silence an n-manifold, cornerless
the length of you along the cliff,
the (Somerset soft white) page
of the bed, the black sea
soaking our sight
with its endless reappearance
the joining of souls seaward
FIVE ISLANDS
1
When she returned, a few weeks later, the café was gone.
Yet that summer evening, a crowd of souls had been laughing and drinking. The story of his past was the story of her future, the child he lost, the child she was carrying.
In the café, the train hurtled toward the switch and in a moment they were looking at each other, one looking forward, the other looking back.
2
She opened the magazine and saw his face. She did not know his name. She had never seen him before, yet who she saw was so familiar, she wept. It was as if a stroke, an aneurysm had removed the crucial memory, yet she felt they belonged to each other with all the force of that loss.
3
Kentish Town. No time to lose, preoccupied. She was walking toward him on the other side of the street. They passed each other. Halfway down the block each turned at the same moment and looked back. He had never believed in it, and there he stood, bullied by fate into belief.
4
In the taberna with friends, his back to the door. He had lived five years in Madrid. Without turning, he felt her come through the doorway. Without turning, he felt the inaudible flame rush through his life, incinerating everything that had come before. The rough scratch of a friction match – “strike anywhere” – on the side of the box.
5
It was not the iron tongue that rings in the waves, tolling its warning in the shifting sea. It was the bell on Sunday morning that woke you in a hotel room in Paris after arriving late at night, unaware you were sleeping so close to a church.
HYPHEN
-
a single stitch
the life entire
path
broken path
furrow
long vowel
love’s dare
love’s repair
love’s patience
love’s acquiescence
love’s indignation
love’s silence
in the last months
you looked at the sea
the pencil’s line
the poem’s line
the typewriter ribbon worn through
on Greene Street
meniscus
horizon
seam between
the dash at the end of phrase, meaning
not yet, meaning
to
continue
IV
BISON
you had one subject
the body
others draw
what the body is, how it endures
pleasure
but
your flesh
speaks something else
every line an outline
of that dark matter that is
not even the self sta
ring from a face,
not the longing to be seen,
not what desires –
even our scorn a form
of desire –
not the pooling of belly and arm
as if the weight of flesh
bends the air
but rather
what self, longing, flesh
are shaped by
what the body proves
the mist
moved slowly across
the field held down
by stones, stitch of trees
what colour was the mist
x-ray grey
how still was it
the IV drip before it falls
mist always at a distance
always as far as sight
I stopped the car to watch it cross the field
black earth breathing its winter breath
a twitch of space a tremor
spasmed the boulders in the field
then the world reformed
stillness again
a lens of water adhering to a branch
slowly I saw it was the stones themselves
that had come alive
bison
the field disappeared in the mist
still the bison stood animal earth invisible
the trees too remained as before
lines of graphite on wet paper
the drop of light on the thorn
still as before
all day you were busy dying
we did not think you would draw again
then suddenly weeks of work
in a few hours
you dug breath from your lungs
knew resting would leave you
too exhausted to continue
sudden as remembering
you opened your eyes
gripped my hand, your instinctive
joy
covalent bond
impossible strength
we have never failed each other
I sat next to the bed
I told you how the bison woke