All We Saw was written to honour intimate friends who died within a short span of time, intimates of more than 30 years, among them the writers John Berger and Mark Strand, my longtime editor Ellen Seligman, my parents…
These poems try to find their relationship with what is beyond language – not only death, but the shared inner life of intentions and ideas, let alone every other kind of intimacy. These poems explore our relationship to mystery; what the body knows in its mortality and what the body might prove.
What language can we have for death? For the unknowable? The last weeks and hours before the imminent death of someone we love is a time both urgent and suspended. No words are restrained enough for that silence or that muteness. It is a time of desire so extreme, language is rendered chaste.
All We Saw asserts that “death must give/not only take from us.” These poems assert not what we hold onto but what we hold.
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
All We Saw published by Bloomsbury (£16.99) is out now. Anne Michaels appears at Manchester Literature Festival, 10 Oct. Big Issue North is proud media partner to the festival