Starting Over
The ritual drowning of poems only to turn your back on that muddy river and find a halo around an apple tree up to its bough in sin. Poems, Slightly Used, April 30, 2010 [ 88 ]
Ruins
Dragonfly prehistoric blue these ants have made of you a church without a bell. Poems, Slightly Used, May 31, 2009 [ 87 ]
Shore Birds
For the past several days, the valley we live in has been full of smoke from wildfires burning north, east, and south of us. For a short time yesterday, we escaped to the ocean to breathe. Shore Birds About the ocean, I can’t quite decide. Is it relentless, or does it have something to hide? Is helplessness its plight? Is it mine? A man with a kite — in […]
From a distance, he probably looks like an old tree stump
in a drained lake bed, but from here, a bust preparing for takeoff.
Or maybe he’s just landed? Half thought, half drought?
Canvas 1,225
[ 85 ]
Canvas 1,225
Sweet Blue Smoke
Let me tell you, it’s no easy thing coaxing these out of the brambles. You’d believe me, if you could see the blood on my arms, and the thorns. Sweet Blue Smoke Now, let’s say you aren’t here, and that what’s happening to you is what’s happening to everyone, and that they aren’t here either, and that this is togetherness, and that togetherness is another word for solitude, and […]
2017
Again and again, while sifting through old drawings,
I find myself stopping at this face. Or maybe I simply find myself.
Canvas 840
[ 83 ]
Canvas 840
The Scent of Gardenia: A Note and a Dream
Up at three-thirty this morning, after reading Spanish for half an hour, I turned to some of the dreams I recorded in 2008 and 2009. Several of them involved my mother and deceased father and my childhood home, and in several others there appeared old school friends, as well as a friend I had at the time who died in 2010. So many strange, familiar situations, filled with longing, color, […]
Lost and Found
Let’s say you have a little radio about the size of the moon, and that as you dial slowly through each of the craters listening for something that appeals to you, you suddenly realize that each dip, pit, and divot is broadcasting the news and music of a single solitary human life, and that their signals are being bounced from star to star in your brain. And yet, somehow, despite […]
2001
That this lumpy old drawing is dear to my heart needs no explanation.
For ten long, short, memorable, forgetful, eventful years,
it lit the right-hand column on the news page of my first website,
I’m Telling You All I Know. Now it is here.
My Father’s Old Chair
[ 80 ]
My Father’s Old Chair
Canvas 1,224 — August 12, 2018
[ 79 ]
William Michaelian 