Pause — March 5, 2019
Pause
After all is said and done
the wind chime
is still
listening
to the falling snow
[ 299 ]
Slow Dance
And what of school? I remember our sturdy little desks in rows, bright, flat crayons, and how their taste resembled their smell, jars of glue, the heavy-paper mess, girls with long straight hair and curls, their fragrant dress, the playground, races, marble games and spinning tops, climbing bars and tractor tires stood up in the ground. And, not far off, in a cloud of dragonflies and dust, a country graveyard […]
An Accident of Birth
I wake up and it all seems so familiar. I suppose that in another life, I was a buzzard on a fence post. And in another, I was the fence post. But where? Was it here, or on some other earth? An Accident of Birth On some days, I was born in a scorching valley, to write with a cactus spine that ends in lines of clotted blood, about […]
The Long Way to Goose Lake
The long way to Goose Lake on a bright frosty morning, birds in the sun over a field of stubble. Or is it your grandfather’s face? Yes, it is, he has returned. No, he hasn’t, he never departed. Yes, you are in his lap and you feel his warmth. And the birds are his thoughts, they are everything he remembers, they are songs of old times never quite ended, only […]
Sore Feet
Does it take self-discipline to let the body work its daily cures and wonders, or simply patience, understanding, attention, gratitude, and love? And where do these things dwell, if not in the body? answered the dove. Sore Feet For the willow tree philosophy is one more leaf on the water. Songs and Letters, March 5, 2008 [ 295 ]
Little Children
The body, in its wisdom, carries the mind along. The mind carries the body. Each is in, and of, the other: the mind is in the body, the body is in the mind. When the mind falls to rust, the body becomes an historical monument, an old cracked liberty bell, venerable, purposeless, inspiring sympathy and awe. When the body falls to rust, the mind becomes a storyteller whose face is […]
First Kiss
This has been a winter of books, and the kind of simple earthly pleasures that are priceless and free — a winter of clouds and ice and sun, of forest paths and waterfalls, of vanilla pages and chamomile grass and moss — a winter of Blake, Thoreau, and Don Quixote, of diaries and letters, and of all that lasts beyond its past and lights the present tense. And it’s not […]
For Bugs and Birds and Words and Lovers
Over the years, I’ve written a great many because poems — because I am alive, because I feel like it, because I have no idea what else I would, could, or should be doing with the moment at hand. “For Bugs and Birds and Words and Lovers” is one of them. But in light of this unnecessary confession, it seems pretty obvious that they all are. For Bugs and […]
Canvas 360 — February 17, 2014
Poem
Light
is
my
prayer.
Poems, Slightly Used, March 9, 2011
[ 291 ]
Canvas 360 — Poem
Still Farming
As an old farmer of the written word, I know that in my deepest cultivation I’m really just scratching the surface, and that the strange crops I bring forth, the cactus and the flower, are food of brief duration, and that when I’m gone, the land I care for and hold dear will be safe harbor for my feeble literary bones. Once, many years ago, while we were engaged in […]
William Michaelian 