from Skin Divers, collected in Poems Your mouth, a hand against my mouth. Pressed to earth, we dream of ocean: heat-soaked, washed with exhaustion, our mariner's sleep haunted by smells of garden--fresh rosemary thirty miles off Spain. Long grasses sway the bottom of our boat. We follow a sequence of scents complex as music, navigate earth places, sea places, follow acoustics of mountains, warbler instinct in the dark-- Siberia, Africa, and back-- phosphor runways guiding us to shore, moonlight half eaten by the waves. Across the lawn, a lit window floats. Welts of lupine. You remember an open window, Arabian music through wet beeches. We know we're moving at tremendous speed, that if it could be seen the stars would be a smear of velocity. But all is still, pinioned. In the night garden, light is a swallowed cry. Naked in the middle of the city the stars grow firm in our mouths.
		Excerpted from Poems by Anne Michaels. Copyright © 2000 by Anne Michaels. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Photo credit © David Laurence