It’s easy to think nature is subdued in cities and towns. But turn your head for just a moment and the pavement is cracked and the cracks are full of weeds. Walk through any neighborhood a time or two and you begin to see wood fences rotting, metal ones rusting, house siding softening, paint peeling, and rooftops covered with fir needles and moss — at least such is the case […]
A peal of thunder so loud and so near, the windows rattle and the house shakes. Or, to put it more succinctly, a skyquake. To happen upon a spring while walking through meadow and wood, and to find strawberries bubbling up from the ground. Or, to put it more succinctly, a mindquake. Suddenly awakening upon the completion of one’s sixty-third trip around the sun, to the voice and touch of […]
An evening sky, deep, dark, and rich with gray-chocolate thunderclouds. Puddles are always large enough for the sky they hold. A walker’s definition of heartbreak — Starlings enough to carry me off, yet I am the one who is feared. And then, suddenly, they do, and I am the one who is scared. May 19, 2019 [ 392 ]
When we returned, the night-scent was on our clothes and in our hair. This morning, our limbs are bare. Orchard Nights Blossoms are lights — think once, they’re nice, think twice, they’re gone — then watch the thoughts fall, until they’re not thought at all. [ 391 ]
Indeed, love bids the earnest question: Can one have truly tasted a fresh, ripe strawberry and still believe in politics and war? The answer is, quite clearly, No. May 17, 2019 Haiku June With my very own eyes — a ripe strawberry picking a little girl. Poems, Slightly Used, June 18, 2009 Rainbow Ring Around the Sun Rainbow ring around the sun rain to come grandson […]
Well done, ax-man, friend. Now look closely.
Beneath the bark of my experience are my growth rings.
And I will be back again.
Canvas 501 — January 1, 2015
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I love how a trace of rain transforms a garden, even one that is already doing very well. I see the same in the neighbors and in myself. Our greens are more vivid and intense in the charged atmosphere; our purples and reds draw notice from the hummingbirds. I wonder now if, in all my years of writing, I have ever used the word aura. I think not. But it […]
As a Cloud If I identify with the idea of myself to the point of paralysis, the world becomes a bottle of pills at my bedside, one to be taken every four to six hours for the duration of my illness. My breath is labored, my vision skewed. Visitors leave tsk-tsking and shaking their heads. If I see myself as a cloud, and watch as I change shape and fade […]
It does not seem to me that I ply an ocean of certainty as a vessel bearing the rare cargo of my imagination. It seems the ocean itself is imagined, and that it possesses its own imagination, which gives rise to me and mine. And if the ocean is deep, deeper still is the sky, into which the stars and planets are dropped one new dream at a time. May […]
On the road. After sleeping well in a strange bed, I think of dead friends and family members, and how, since I carry them with me, they too have traveled. The flickering lights of boats anchored offshore, like the lowest of low stars. Along the steep wooded path that leads to the sand, wild cucumbers already in bloom, stars for rabbits and carpenter ants. The ocean sky at dawn — […]
William Michaelian 