As a Cloud If I identify with the idea of myself to the point of paralysis, the world becomes a bottle of pills at my bedside, one to be taken every four to six hours for the duration of my illness. My breath is labored, my vision skewed. Visitors leave tsk-tsking and shaking their heads. If I see myself as a cloud, and watch as I change shape and fade […]
It does not seem to me that I ply an ocean of certainty as a vessel bearing the rare cargo of my imagination. It seems the ocean itself is imagined, and that it possesses its own imagination, which gives rise to me and mine. And if the ocean is deep, deeper still is the sky, into which the stars and planets are dropped one new dream at a time. May […]
On the road. After sleeping well in a strange bed, I think of dead friends and family members, and how, since I carry them with me, they too have traveled. The flickering lights of boats anchored offshore, like the lowest of low stars. Along the steep wooded path that leads to the sand, wild cucumbers already in bloom, stars for rabbits and carpenter ants. The ocean sky at dawn — […]
Fiction, thought, tragedy, love — how beautifully intertwined they are — as when a story is a poem running down your arms. My Lemon Tree I went out early this morning to water my lemon tree. This year, it is loaded with fruit. There is so much fruit that the lemons are small. Yet they are full of juice and have not been reluctant to ripen. I find this […]
Gratitude To fall up, as any bird might that has just been nudged from the nest. May 10, 2019 [ 381 ]
Even after his stroke and up to his death on January 6, 1990, at the age of ninety-three, my father’s father never did forget who we were. Many at the Armenian Home in Fresno, where he chose to spend the last few years of his life, weren’t as fortunate. This short poem was inspired by our visits there, and by the vineyards we used to pass on the way. “At […]
Yesterday morning I distributed more than six gallons of water using my favorite one-quart child’s watering can, visiting each plant in the garden with a miniature rain shower, sans vocalizations. I might have thundered, but the can does not make that kind of rain. Its gentle blue drops are more like single notes plucked ever so lightly on a banjo — lightly, as in, composed of light as much as […]
However patiently and faithfully I try to record the quotidian, I find it becomes charged with memory and dream, as if these states of mind or being are infused with a fine mist, like that which heightens the illusion of any natural scene. Set down the most common of items, and it buds and flowers before the sentence ends. Melody Words are living things. Sometimes, through ignorance and arrogance, […]
If each of the senses is a unique form of intelligence, it would be wise to approach them not as if we are their petty dictators, conquerors, or owners, but as witnesses and explorers. Perhaps we would discover the senses are really not many, but one; or maybe we would learn there are more. Or it might be the other way around, and we are the living testimony of their […]
Not that many days ago, I was nearly finished with my evening walk when, at the foot of a driveway of a house for sale, I was met with a single bark by a shaggy, two-toned spaniel. At the same time, I noticed a man occupied at some task behind, and mostly obscured by, an old white pickup. I greeted the dog and bent down to let it sniff the […]
William Michaelian 