A Poem That Makes My Heart Sing

If you missed my IG caption, Anne Michaels was the first author that made me feel viscerally alive after reading her work. Fugitive pieces was the first book that turned me into a devourer of text — I didn’t know that worlds could be strung together with such eloquence prior to this, and I'm forever grateful for stumbling upon it when I was young.

She was also the first person that showed me that poetry wasn’t only for the elite, but that it was a palatable art form for anyone. Memoriam was the first poem that I read where I realized the immense power poetry has to move, and to make people feel. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have, again and again.

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MEMORIAM

In lawnchairs under stars. On the dock
at midnight, anchored by winter clothes,
we lean back to read the sky. Your face white
in the womb light, the lake's electric skin.

Driving home from Lewiston, full and blue, the moon
over one shoulder of highway. There,
or in your kitchen at midnight, sitting anywhere
in the seeping dark, we bury them again and
again under the same luminous thumbprint.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.

Their stones are salt and mark where we look back.
Your mother's hand at the end of an empty sleeve,
scratching at your palm, drawing blood.
Your aunt in a Jewish graveyard in Poland,
her face a permanent fist of pain.
Your first friend, Saul, who died faster than
you could say forgive me.
When I was nine and crying from a dream
you said words that hid my fear.
Above us the family slept on,
mouths open, hands scrolled.
Twenty years later your tears burn the back of my throat.
Memory has a hand in the grave up to the wrist.
Earth crumbles from your fist under the sky's black sieve.
We are orphaned, one by one.

On the beach at Superior, you found me
where I'd been for hours, cut by the lake's sharp rim.
You stopped a dozen feet from me.
What passed in that quiet said:
I have nothing to give you.

At dusk, birch forest is a shore of bones.
I've pulled stones from the earth's black pockets,
felt the weight of their weariness - worn,
exhausted from their sleep in the earth.
I've written on my skin with their black sweat.

The lake's slight movement is stilled by fading light.
Soon the stars' tiny mouths, the moon's blue mouth.

I have nothing to give you, nothing to carry,
some words to make me less afraid, to say
you gave me this.
Memory insists with its sea voice,
muttering from its bone cave.
Memory wraps us
like the shell wraps the sea.
Nothing to carry,
some stones to fill our pockets,
to give weight to what we have.

— Anne Michaels, The Weight of Oranges / Miner's Pond. McClelland & Stewart, 1997. p.20