From 'Poems' - by Anne Michaels

Sometimes I'm certain that those who are happy
know one thing more than us... or one thing less.

Everyone knows promises comes from fear.

Even in a place you know intimately,
each night's darkness is different.

I'm living proof we don't stop wanting what we can't have.

I used to think we escaped time
by disappearing into beauty.
Now I see it's the opposite.
Beauty reveals time.

What I learned then sustains me
through every sorrow:
it's the believer who keeps looking for proof.

The source of light
is the painter's body.

The kind of music where loss wears gloves.

Only love sees the familiar for the first time.

Not that paint captures light,
but that light breaks free from the paint.

A still life isn't about fruit, but about
time.

Lovers are equal only when so steeped
in corruption, knowledge of the other
is no longer a weapon.

The immanence that reassembles matter
passes through us then disperses
into time and place.

Waiting for experience to find its way
into us.

How similar the leap of faith and the leap
of fear.

History is the love that enters us
through death; its discipline
is grief.

Walter Benjamin, who devoured books
"the way a flame 'reads' wood."

In a dream
the hooded hawk is sometimes
love, sometimes
death; everything stops at the moment
of unmasking.

Colette said, when one we love dies
there's no reason to stop
writing them letters.