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Turning Twenty-Three (Anne Michaels)

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Turning Twenty-Three
Anne Michaels
From "The Weight of Oranges/Miner's Pond"1

You turned twenty-two in the rain.
We walked in rubber boots
along Lowther, the shiny street as albumen
under streetlamps.2

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.3

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.4

To love one person above all others
is despair, you said, turning twenty-two.
Propaganda of the senses, the narrow-minded heart.5

We are magnets, averted
by our sameness.6

Above the corrugated, elastic lake
the darkening sky holds out its arms.
A thousand miles away, you're turning twenty-three7

I repeat your name, each time different
into sand, into moonlight.8

Far off, the lake crumbles at its edges,
the sky holds out its arms.

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