Poems Quotes

“Now we’re like planets, holding to each other
from a great distance.
[...] Now we’re hundreds of miles apart,
our short arms keep us lonely,
no one hears what’s in my head.
[...] It’s March, even the birds
don’t know what to do with themselves.”
― Anne Michaels, Poems: The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, Skin Divers

“I want you to promise
we’ll see each other again,
you’ll send a letter.
Promise we’ll be lost together
in our forest, pale birches of our legs.

I hear your voice now—I know,
everyone knows promises come from fear.
People don’t live past each other,
you’re always here with me. Sometimes
I pretend you’re in the other room
until it rains… and then
this is the letter I always write...”
― Anne Michaels, Poems: The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, Skin Divers

“The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.”
― Anne Michaels, Poems: The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, Skin Divers

“Grief strikes where love struck first.”
― Anne Michaels, Poems: The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, Skin Divers

“Letters should be written to send news, to say
send me news, to say
meet me at the train station.”
― Anne Michaels, Poems: The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, Skin Divers

“The way we fall from each other like halves of an orange,
skin dark as pottery in lamplight.
I know it, naked in the light of the fridge,
cold plummy resins in our mouths, warm sticky resins
of our bodies. By nights
we drain the pictures from your head and words
from my throat until I find nothing but sounds there.
And today, by way of light closing around itself
until the river is dark and all I see is your white breath.
By way of a young woman’s hunger
to taste every part of her lover, even his words.

—Anne Michaels, from “The Day Of Jack Chambers” Poems: The Weight of Oranges, Miner's Pond, Skin Divers (Knopf; 1st edition, January 4, 2000)”
― Anne Michaels, Poems: The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, Skin Divers

“Flowers"

There's another skin inside my skin
that gathers to your touch, a lake to the light;
that looses its memory, its lost language
into your tongue,
erasing me into newness.

Just when the body thinks it knows
the ways of knowing itself,
this second skin continues to answer.

In the street - café chairs abandoned
on terraces; market stalls emptied
of their solid light,
though pavement still breathes
summer grapes and peaches.
Like the light of anything that grows
from this newly-turned earth,
every tip of me gathers under your touch,
wind wrapping my dress around our legs,
your shirt twisting to flowers in my fists.”
― Anne Michaels, Poems: The Weight of Oranges, Miner’s Pond, Skin Divers