Light Fantastic
“It’s foolish to walk in the rain,” they say, and I come in dripping just to tell them, “It’s foolish to wait for spring.” [ 647 ]
New Poems & Pieces
Letters, Journals, and Poems
This afternoon I finished reading the third volume of Thoreau’s journal — the third of fourteen, as published in 1906 by Houghton Mifflin and Company. And I am set to begin The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, after reading the introduction for the fourth or fifth time early this morning. As with Whitman, I continue my habit of reading aloud — except in the case of The Letters of Henry […]
Be Mine
Beautiful old-fashioned valentines. There’s a box of them here in my mother’s desk that she kept from her grammar school days. Delicate, simple, intricate, ornate, all with familiar names. Off to the library, now, to high school, to marriage, to war. Home again, home again. To clothesline. To family. To a walk through the park. And what have we here? Someone’s initials, in the heart of the sycamore? “Old-Fashioned Valentines” […]
Long Island Line
In the form of his complete poetry and prose, Walt Whitman has been a daily companion of mine for the last three months. Today I opened and closed the uncommon-common book of his life for the last time — but not, if I am granted the necessary health and a similar span of years, for ever or for all time. Clearly, there is much about our time that would not […]
All Together Now
Do I know you as well as I know those I know in the flesh? Yes. Because in both ways of knowing, it’s really my imagination that creates you. Is this a way of saying I don’t know you at all, or that I know you ever so little? Yes. And that, too, is beautiful. Do you know me? Is that something I can ever know? I don’t know. Do […]
Reconciled
There are three sides to a coin — heads, tails, and its round enduring edge. There is its smell, there is its taste, there is its weight, there is its heft. There is its tactile depth — its diametric likeness to a map. There is its real, temporary, imagined worth — the things it represents. There is my hand. There is my pocket. There is my life. There is my […]
All Face
Yesterday afternoon, while I was out in a windstorm, picking up debris from a windstorm the day before that, I was so impressed by the spread of deep, thick moss everywhere that I vowed to spend a lot more time outdoors with my shoes off — after the weather warms just a bit. This morning, though, I wonder if I should wait at all. The uncovered part of my face […]
High and Low
A baby’s high chair so high his head’s in the clouds, and, to feed the dear angel, we must climb the nearest mountain through ice and snow with his tiny spoon in our hands — but why do we imagine such things? To explain, I suppose, the ice on our shoes, and the spikes and the ropes. A man’s thoughts so low we must sound the very depths of hell […]
Main Street
I remember from my boyhood a man in the old hometown who had survived a tragic car accident, and whose face was disfigured beyond recognition, having been reconstructed by the doctors into a featureless, expressionless mask. In the barbershop one day, the first time I saw him, I watched from my place high in the third chair as he entered and exchanged friendly greetings with several men waiting who apparently […]
Canvas 824 — Patience
I wonder, is it possible to cultivate a patience so gentle and profound that it outlives the flesh? Or is patience a pond we bathe in, and cannot defile with our death? We were greeted by a friendly, talkative woodpecker yesterday near Goose Lake — a young bird more intent on socializing than carrying on its regular craft and trade. Watching us from a bare trunk not five feet away, […]
William Michaelian 