2014
Canvas 423
[ 111 ]
He Knows
This poem was written April 20, 1999. I don’t know why I didn’t send it to more magazines back in the day, because it was published all three times I offered it. Who knows — maybe an alert editor will see it here and ask to publish it. Or maybe he or she will simply smile, and wonder what the other editors could have possibly seen in a poem so […]
Verb or Noun
Every day, I notice how worn our broom has become. I suppose it might take a little longer to sweep the same space, I really don’t know. And when I finish, and the walk and steps are clean, I might be a little older than I would have been had I been using a new broom. Or I might be a little younger. Time, if it exists, is such a […]
Fall
For each of the twelve hundred pages in my first website, I’m Telling You All I Know (2001-2011), I made a little drawing, occasionally in ink, but almost always with a school pencil, after which I scanned it into the computer and added it manually to the HTML page. Then I uploaded the page to the host server. Without exception, the drawing was done after the writing. The pages were […]
As Willows Love Water
Poor little thing. A few days ago, I moved our struggling crape myrtle away from the cedar to a new place at the base of an old camellia stump. After I’d watered it in, I decided it was a pomegranate tree. I’ve been calling it a pomegranate ever since. It seems quite pleased. There will be no fruit this year, of course, but I fully expect it to bloom next […]
Nightfall
Done in 2009, Nightfall is also part of Primitive, a glossy volume released the following year. [ 105 ]
September Poems
The ancient texts of solemn trees. Bird tracks at my feet. Late-night lights in the widow’s house. Lichens on headstones. Thrice-woven wool. Galaxies that resemble scattered straw. Notebooks filled. A wealth of steam. The luck of rice. dew in the dust on the old man’s mailbox he reads his letters twice [ 104 ]
Another Song I Know
This is another of the sixty-four very short poems that comprise one of my first published books. I say one of the first, because Another Song I Know and Winter Poems were released by Cosmopsis Books in San Francisco on the same day in June 2007 — released, it might be, like birds, or, better still, like children, whose idea of home changes ever so subtly every day for the […]
Pigeons Are Old Poems
Empty barns, dry grass by the door. A house once here, Not here anymore. And yet pigeons are old poems, of that I am sure. Pigeons, and grave stones, where once there were words. Who knows the dreams that lie here buried? About a mile down the road from the house where I grew up, there is a little cemetery situated on a corner knoll where the soil is […]
William Michaelian 
You must be logged in to post a comment.