Sometimes I look into my old books as a dying man looks into the sunset and easily finds himself there. Other times, I turn their pages as might a man with dreams and plans with time and energy enough to realize them. A few moments ago, reading the introduction of a small hardcover published in 1893, a book I read in its entirety several years ago, I felt almost as […]
We met Thoreau yesterday, in the company of his faithful dog, Ruby, whose joyful presence inspires the world around her to reveal its secrets. Immediately after greeting us on the trail, he told us, beaming with delight, that he’d discovered a very tall dogwood in bloom, which he said is a Pacific dogwood. The tree, the tallest of its kind we’ve ever seen, is just visible from the main path, […]
What to say, that might do justice to the experience of being alive? To notice, perhaps, that the well worn and oft-misused word, justice, is just ice, and that those two words more accurately represent the meaning of the one as we are likely to encounter it? Or that law is a word that signifies less a universal moral code than something to be feared, and which is wielded by […]
Over the years, our mailman has become quite friendly. A shaggy, white-haired, white-bearded fellow who more than once has posed as Santa Claus, he stops most days in the shade of our juniper to shuffle his trays of mail before continuing on his route. He sees nothing but comedy in his job, and in the inner workings of the post office, in his view, the ill logic, the inefficiency, the […]
I still walk every day, but my whispers have died on the vine. This is a good thing, because it was almost immediately plain that they were leading nowhere and were better off left unuttered. Eleven entries in all, I’ll let them stand as a reminder: when there is nothing to say, say nothing. And, even when there is something to say, chances are that it should be left unsaid […]
Once again, it’s time to pause — to look up, to look around, to look within. And so for an indefinite period, I’ll be taking a break from publishing, and from most other online activity, including reading and social media, and giving myself up not only to the bright, cold days of winter, but to books, ink, paper, and private correspondence instead. Yours always with thanks and warm regards, William […]
If whatever I write, or draw, or make, or do, is to be fresh and new, and not simply more of the same, however pleasant and comfortable that same may seem, must I not make sure that I am myself fresh and new? Must I not be my own peaceful revolution, and free of my usual thought pattern, with all its familiar repetition and redundancy? Must I not be willing […]
So far as it pertains to collecting and preserving what I feel are the best of my old writings and drawings, the time has come — if it has not passed already — to lay this work to rest. As such, I have tried to make Poems, Notes, and Drawings cohesive and readable from beginning to end. In that regard, I think of it as a book; I also see […]
When I refer to my body as it, I feel I am being unfair. But would him be any more accurate? Would her? And why my, when, if there is any belonging at all, the belonging belongs to the earth? January 5, 2022 . And Here Is a Child I love, too, those thoughts that almost rise, almost begin, then vanish, content to seek no substance or body, and whose […]
Forty-seven degrees. Across the street, the big bare tree behind the neighbor’s house is full of starlings, so many it sounds like spring. Earlier, from the front window, I saw a squirrel jump from the edge of the roof into the cedar. Such a leap would not have been possible a year ago — the tree has grown that much. In that spirit, I am making a small leap myself. […]
William Michaelian 