I've returned to Anne Michaels once again. Or, given that I'm writing about some of her poetry in my thesis, perhaps I should say that I have returned to her novels once again, although the two do not feel all that different from one another. I'm reading The Winter Vault right now. It is totally indulgent. I don't really have time for this variety of reading. But I crawl into bed at night and read it out loud to myself, and it is deeply restorative after the natural disaster of a thesis has battered my mind all day. As I am reading this novel, I keep thinking of this particular poem by Michaels. It's called "Phantom Limbs" and pulls on some of the same themes that the novel works with. How do buildings embody those who create them, those who live in them? Can we separate ourselves from place? It's an idea that intrigues me.

"The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal heart."
     —Charles Baudelaire 

So much of the city
is our bodies. Place in us
old light still slants through to.
Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,
like phantom limbs. 

Even the city carries ruins in its heart.
Longs to be touched in places
only it remembers. 

[KEEP READING]