While reading Emerson’s journal this morning, I came to a one-line entry of such a painful, personal nature that even now, almost two hundred years after it was written, I feel I have invaded the poor man’s privacy. Yet I am glad I read it. Had I been the editor, I would have thought long and hard about including it, but I am sure I would have done so — […]
Isn’t it revealing that we say time passes, when it is really we who pass? The heron we saw two mornings ago standing motionless at water’s edge — what need has he of time? What need has anything? What need the mountains, the rivers, the trees, the stars, the moon? Time is a drug we take in frequent small doses. It isn’t required for our health or survival, yet we […]
Fruit is falling — ripe, soft, hard, green. Humanity is the shaken tree. December 6, 2020 . [ 949 ]
It’s rare anymore that I use the word my — my writing, my poems, my books, my furniture, my house, my friends, my wife, my love, my life, my time. Only when it’s necessary for the sake of clarity and meaning, or to properly assume responsibility, does the word seem justified — as in, This is my perception, or, This is my experience, or, This is my mess. Otherwise, the […]
My first paying job away from the farm was picking grapes on the neighbor’s place immediately west of ours. I was twelve. I worked with the neighbor’s double-jointed son, who was the same age. We did that for two seasons. It was hot, dirty, and dangerous. The danger was from two sources: black widow spiders and yellow jackets. One year, in the space of three days, I killed thirty-four black […]
The Library of America volume devoted to the writings of William Wells Brown begins with his 1847 Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. I’ve read twenty-eight of its forty-five pages thus far. And while it has revealed no general detail about slavery that I haven’t already encountered, the simple, stark clarity of Brown’s writing, coupled with his frank honesty in terms of his personal regrets and easily forgiven […]
Saturn and Jupiter have become intimate with the horizon. They are lights glowing in a cabin in the woods, one in the loft, the other on the table beside an open book. Reading Their Eyes Were Watching God is like living through a hurricane. In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, God is a hurricane. And fate is a rabid dog. Life, though, is a song on the lips of love. What […]
I have pruned orchards, and rows and rows of vines. Mud on the ladder, frost on the ground. This makes me different somehow. Cold toes. Orange peels. The bright fur coats of faithful hounds. Now my pen has wooden handles, with a blade at the end. In the fog, its voice makes the strangest sound. November 29, 2020 . As It Is Written After a long day’s work, the writer […]
I cannot even say, with certainty, It is what it is. Does it really exist? Do I? Is the existence of one dependent upon the other, and vice-versa? Do you and I exist, if we do, because of each other, and perhaps even for each other? Are our lives a dream? Are we living now, or then, or some other when? Are we dead? Are we in the womb unborn? […]
In the dark chill, between boughs, a thought not quite a thought moves — flutters, falls . [ 942 ]
William Michaelian 