This poem by Anne Michaels, written more than a decade ago, anticipates some of the themes of her new novel The Winter Vault, a passionate love story which juxtaposes historic events—the building of the St Lawrence Seaway and the Aswan Dam—with intimate moments in the lives of the characters, whose paths are altered in the course of their involvement with these ambitious constructions.
There is No City that Does Not Dream
There is no city that does not dream
from its foundations. The lost lake
crumbling in the hands of the brickmakers,
the floor of the ravine where light lies broken
with the memory of rivers. All the winters
stored in that geologic
garden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subway
at Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bones
under the rumbling track. The storm
that lit the city with the voltage
of spring, when we were eighteen
on the clean earth. The ferry ride in the rain,
wind wet with wedding music and everything that
sings in the carbon of stone and bone
like a page of love, wind-lost from a hand, unread.
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