William Michaelian

Poems, Notes, and Drawings

Still Here

A peal of thunder so loud and so near, the windows rattle and the house shakes. Or, to put it more succinctly, a skyquake. To happen upon a spring while walking through meadow and wood, and to find strawberries bubbling up from the ground. Or, to put it more succinctly, a mindquake. Suddenly awakening upon the completion of one’s sixty-third trip around the sun, to the voice and touch of […]

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Heartbreak

An evening sky, deep, dark, and rich with gray-chocolate thunderclouds. Puddles are always large enough for the sky they hold. A walker’s definition of heartbreak — Starlings enough to carry me off, yet I am the one who is feared. And then, suddenly, they do, and I am the one who is scared. May 19, 2019 [ 392 ]

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Orchard Nights

When we returned, the night-scent was on our clothes and in our hair. This morning, our limbs are bare.   Orchard Nights Blossoms are lights — think once, they’re nice, think twice, they’re gone — then watch the thoughts fall, until they’re not thought at all. [ 391 ]

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The Chosen Ones

This world I see, feel, taste, touch, imagine, dream — is my consciousness. And so my early-morning walk, with its chimney smoke, irises, and crows, is my own private mirror. A quick glance, and I see what I think I see. But a deeper gaze reveals eternity, and thus the futility of all thoughts mercenary, by which to the loser goes the spoils. To hate someone is to hate myself. […]

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Strawberries — Haiku, Poem, and Dream

Indeed, love bids the earnest question: Can one have truly tasted a fresh, ripe strawberry and still believe in politics and war? The answer is, quite clearly, No. May 17, 2019   Haiku June With my very own eyes — a ripe strawberry picking a little girl. Poems, Slightly Used, June 18, 2009       Rainbow Ring Around the Sun Rainbow ring around the sun rain to come grandson […]

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Work Notes

I love how a trace of rain transforms a garden, even one that is already doing very well. I see the same in the neighbors and in myself. Our greens are more vivid and intense in the charged atmosphere; our purples and reds draw notice from the hummingbirds. I wonder now if, in all my years of writing, I have ever used the word aura. I think not. But it […]

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Fable Wind

The world ended, but no one told the seed, and it was wild in its imagining.   Fable Wind All at once the fable wind came crashing at my door. I let her in upon her well-made horse, a beast with nostril caves and sunrise eyes. They ringing crossed in clatter-prance my rocking ship-deck floor, The wind’s long hair a ripened field of painted flame. Ocean mist caressed her shoulders […]

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Canvas 389 — As a Cloud

Canvas 389 — May 14, 2014

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 […]

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And All of This

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 […]

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