The crocuses we planted near the sidewalk and which had their first bloom last spring, doubled, tripled, possibly even quadrupled this year. Like love, the bulbs are spreading, and in so doing, they are making their own fertile ground. Wobbles a squeaky old tricycle and a squeaky old man love is the child who gives him her hand [ 337 ]
Flies on the screen late in the fall, worn out and slow, less rumble than show, in shiny old armor. The grapes gone, the vineyard leaves yellowing, the weeds spent and dry. Not a drop of rain. Walnuts drying in big wooden boxes leaning against the shed. In front of the house, at the side of the road, a boy steps out of a big yellow bus. Thoughtfully, absently, presently, […]
The printed certificate with ornamental border shows that I was born in 1956, on the twentieth day of the month of May, in the small town of Dinuba, in the county of Tulare, in the central part of the San Joaquin Valley of California, southeast of the much larger town of Fresno. The third of three sons, I was named William on the third day after my glorious Sunday afternoon […]
It’s easy to remember a feeling that has never departed — indeed, which seems to have been with one since birth. And it’s natural enough to give it a name, and maybe even think of it as a poem. Living is like that, isn’t it? — a hook with a hat on it, a face in the mirror, a place we call home, where clouds become walls, and a soft light […]
I don’t have a lofty idea of myself as something apart, say, from the workings of my innards, or the flexing of my tendons and toes as I crawl around the yard pulling weeds, while my ears are engaged in the harvest of birdsong. I once entertained the time-honored belief that I might be an entity distinct from my body, but that belief has since given way to an acceptance […]
Fool me. I am more than willing. Think me a fool. I am. Be the smart one, the intelligent one, the one who knows. Hold the clear advantage. Then, with your startling brilliance, use me to advance yourself, and manipulate me to accomplish your lofty aims and goals. When you are done, cast me aside, the dry husk of your ambition. How cold, your gravestone. How bitter and lonely, your […]
The first warm weather, and suddenly the street is full of people who have been in hiding for the last five months, blinking, stretching, squinting, strolling, looking like pale ghosts. Who are these two children peddling by, and why have I never seen them before? Where do they live? I smile. My smile isn’t returned. Instead they stare. And I suppose to them I must look like a hermit down […]
I am as old now as I was when I was a child in my first pair of overalls, standing at the edge of the garden with my face near a flower. I even wear the same smile, a smile a bee might wear if he suddenly discovered he was human. And I am as old as the bee. I am as old now as I was when the fall […]
They approached him as if his mind were a cactus, when it was really a colorful old bus on its way through the desert. “A Sad Mistake” Songs and Letters, January 7, 2008 Night I picture a man with a typewriter in his lap, sitting on an old wooden chair beside a rusted mailbox, a field of wildflowers behind him. There is paper in the typewriter. Looking down from […]
I have not been myself lately, said the wind. Nor I, said the mountain. The shepherd boy, who had been listening, took up his flute. When he was an old man, he put it down again and died. And the wind rushed, and the mountain blushed, to the depths of the canyon. Nothing I said to my mother, I said to my father, “I have nothing to do.” To […]
William Michaelian 