All We Saw: Poems Read online

  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
is 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 s
taring 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