He’s kissing a girl who’s been packing peaches, elbow-deep in fuzz. She’s damp with sweat and has tired breath — it’s hot and the hours are long. In the house, the old farmer almost sleeps through lunch. His wife watches through the window — she knows the boy — but of course it’s his parents she really knows. And anyway, it’s not her daughter, the pretty girl from town, just […]
Thoreau’s journal, the second of fourteen volumes, done. At age thirty-four, he weighed one hundred twenty-seven pounds. He would venture out on moonlight nights and bathe in ponds. When I closed the book, I found berry juice on my thumbs. [ 506 ]
I do not carry a notebook or a pen. If I write it down, what then? Best to leave it be, and let it pass through and over me. And even that is arrogant. As if I will be, a moment hence, what I thought I was, and who I think I am. Yet I write it now — a willful child, a fleeting man — a penance of the […]
Wondered the child, Is God in the clouds, or are the clouds in God? And God said, That is a question I love. And the child sang low. And the child sang on. [ 504 ]
Of our love, may others say they are moved to poetry. Of our foolishness, may they say they are moved to love. [ 503 ]
Sleep is a boy fishing on the last day of summer — then school begins. Fishing I am fishing now, in a stream that has followed me down from the big sky at night, muddy and rippled with stars. My shoes are dreaming on a rock, full of fine wet sand. My clothes have begun to doubt me, but my hat is a mile wide, a meadow yawning in […]
Suddenly I notice that scratching my left arm near the elbow makes a cricket-sound. After being a cricket for a minute or two, I’m ready to be human again, albeit differently. Now I wonder if I was human before. And what if this is a sign that I’m becoming a cricket, or that I’ve really been a cricket all along, or that I was, or will be, a cricket in […]
In the grocery store, I met a gentle dog wearing an unnecessary muzzle. We looked into each other’s eyes — ah! and if I may put it so, we exchanged souls. But the one who’d placed the muzzle there looked through me and beyond, like a window in the cold. And through it I saw another chance — I saw it come, and saw it go. [ 500 ]
Experience is a word. Words are beautiful.
And that is why I’m a pilgrim in this world.
Canvas 422 — August 31, 2014
[ 499 ]
Cricket in the fern, cricket in the bush —
oh, the lovers who never meet in this world,
turned poets, one by one, like us!
Minstrel
Primitive: Selected Drawings in Pixel, Pencil & Pen, 2010
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William Michaelian 