Compost Studios

by Anne Michaels

You turned twenty-two in the rain.

We walked in rubber boots

along Lowther, the street shiny as albumen

under streetlamps.

At midnight, the sky suddenly clear,

we drove your jazz-filled car

through cold pungent streets to the lake

where we collected stones by flashlight.

The wind wrapped us in its torsions,

we couldn't hear each other although we shouted,

wet with star-swallowing waves.

By morning the stones we'd found

were dull with air,

but I couldn't forget the smell

of the trees' intimate darkness,

the scattered sound of the rain's distracted hands,

husks of buds in green pools on the sidewalks.

To love one person above all others

is despair, you said, turning twenty-two.

Propaganda of the senses, the narrow-minded heart--

We are magnets, averted

by our sameness.

Above the corrugated, elastic lake

the darkening sky holds out its arms.

A thousand miles away, you're turning twenty-three.

I repeat your name, each time different,

into sand, into moonlight.

Far off, the lake crumbles at its edges,

the sky holds out its arms.