There’s one thing I’ve become convinced of over the years: we are all angels, and we are all mirrors. What Others See Somewhere, in a fairy tale beside a dream, there is a boy who swallows a firefly, and a girl with seven knees. Beautiful knees her jealous mother tries to hide. The firefly lives inside the boy, makes his hair and fingers glow. The boy and girl meet: I […]
2011
We’re better seen from across the room,
better still the intervening field of successive years in wheaten rows,
where lay, concealed, our snow-white bones.
Remembrance, 2011
[ 57 ]
Where does a dream end, and the act of remembering it begin? That’s like asking the storyteller if he knows he’s a ghost. The observer is observed, observing the observer, in a succession of night-blue mirrors. And the eyes in them are stars. Some are moving away, others drawing near. And here is the imagined space between them. Lost in San Francisco Lost in San Francisco, I met a […]
Early each morning, the people quietly arose, then emerged from their cottages with their pitchers to fill them with light. It was wonderful to see them gathered at the well — mothers first with their children, each child with a pitcher of its own, infants with tiny thimbles old men trembling to keep hold, farmers, midwives, poets. There was a wise saying in those days: First, let us bring light. […]
When one posts blog entries almost daily for ten years, there are inevitable changes — in mood, certainly, but also in subject matter, style, and approach. And yet, written as they are by the same hand, they are familiar and recognizable. It’s a bit like visiting a waterfall during different times of the year: now the music is heightened; now the rocks are more exposed; and while the distance from […]
Should you ask what it is I’m trying to express, I would answer, I’m not trying. And to confess? Maybe this: Not flying. Not dying. [ 53 ]
I think I’ve already mentioned somewhere that I tend to forget poems almost as soon as they’re written. It’s interesting, because so many, like this one, are memory-driven, and each verse is its own childhood or family album. Rainbows and Windmills Sometimes we leave with rainbows in our pockets, and sometimes we travel without them, knowing there are always rainbows about; and yet a crumpled rainbow is its own […]
Night in bloom The night in bloom, as if the moon both meant to stay, and go; just so, my hat, my coat, my soul. Recently Banned Literature, November 8, 2014 [ 51 ]
Back in 2009, looking for something in one of our closets, I found an unopened pack of index cards and some No. 2 pencils. Among others of their kind, these drawings eventually found their way into Primitive, copies of which are tucked away in the very same closet. [ 50 ]
1 at the center of which is Man, said the woman unto him, laughing, her symphony a breath of hands. 2 There were walls in those days: 3 The cotton patch on one side, impossible to mend; her father at the window, plotting murder; her mother knitting sandwiches: 4 Bolls, half open, scratchy to retrieve; the failed blood of […]
William Michaelian 