Storm sky of green marble

from What the Light Teaches
Anne Michaels

     10

For years I've driven towards you in spring rain,
storm sky of green marble,
slow traffic a caravan of swinging lanterns,
windshield wipers like clock hands.
Poems by Tsvetaeva on the seat beside me,
flowers in wet paper.

As the hours pass, the hard seeds in my heart
soften and swell as I think of your kitchen
with its stone floor
like a summerhouse in Peredelkino,
and of Mandelstam, exiled to Yelabuga on the Kama:
"if you must leave the city,
it's best to live near a river."

You fly out of the darkness at me,
twisting open the tin sky.

The thunderstorm becomes other storms:
darkness steeping like tea above Burnside Drive,
with its slippery crease of rusted leaves;
or the night on High Street, rain
streaming like milk down the windshield
the moment the streetlights clicked on.
I think of young Akhmatova,
under a black umbrella with Modigliani,
reading Verlaine in the Luxembourg.
All the languages they spoke -
Russian, Italian, French -
and still, their lovemaking was with roses!
Language is not enough
for what they had to tell each other.

Never to lose this joy,
driving to one who awaits my arrival.

Soon I will be standing on your porch, dripping
with new memory, a thin dress soaked with May rain.

Rain that helps one past grow out of another.


Yes, Anne Michaels two days in a row. What can I say? I adore her writing. And the opening stanza of this poem is so well-suited to the weather lately.