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 ]
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 […]
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 ]
The potted petunia bloomed itself silly, then we cut it back, and now it’s covered with fresh green growth and a wealth of new flowers. Purple, púrpura, velvet, terciopelo. One thing I notice about older hikers who walk with a stick, is how the stick is as much a companion as it is a physical aid. For me, metal walking poles, as useful as they apparently are, have no appeal. […]
Somewhere between 1965 and 1968, a box of fifty Santa Fe Fairmont cigars cost eight dollars at the liquor store next to United Market. The price for a transistor radio battery was nineteen cents — three cents more than a single cigar. I was too young then to buy cigars. But I smoked them, indirectly, when my father lit one. Back then, he smoked several a day. But he quit […]
I think I remember hearing many years ago that my grade school friend and neighbor, Edwin, was bitten by a rattlesnake in the foothills east of our little hometown in California. But I have no idea who might have told me, and I haven’t seen Edwin since before then. The last time was in 1975, in the bowling alley at the student union at the university in Fresno. He was […]
To open a watermelon, we must first choose a place for the door. Remember: there will be no handle, no lock, no bell — only light, and a thumping sound sure to call children — a split and a crack like a limb or a shack weighted with ice in the winter. Out back is the mind. Leave it behind. This is no time for thinking. And what do we […]
In the cool dark this morning there was a disturbance in one of the small trees a few feet from our open front window. A bird called out as if from a dream, in a tone of voice one doesn’t hear during the day. A minute or so later, a towhee spun a few notes, as if to say, I can’t see, but I can hear. This was repeated perhaps […]
William Michaelian 
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