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” […]
Do I give enough? There’s equal peril in yes and no. If I remove I from the equation, where does the question go? Is there still an I to know? With the I removed, the giver flows — the giver is a river. The receiver cools his toes. Performance and Pose Performance and pose . . . giving way, finally, to a performance that there is no pose, and […]
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, […]
Expecting snow. Expecting rain. Expecting spring. Expecting soup. Expecting carrots. Expecting beans. Expecting love. Expecting death. Expecting wings. His Own Clock Ticking A human aware of his own clock ticking, I give you the weather — as it relates to my own, which, having just bathed, is moist and warm and promising sun — a day begun precisely so, is all that matters, and must not be ignored. How […]
Back to the falls — but not the same falls, no; never have we seen the water rushing so madly; never have we heard it thundering so loudly on the rocks below; the creek in torrent, fed by laughing streams dancing across the path on one side, and spilling over ferns, moss, rocks, and downed branches on the other; a dusting of snow all around; the temperature about thirty-five degrees; […]
We always think it’s someone else. But it isn’t.
O hate! O love! O death! O war!
January 8, 2020
Canvas 1,128 — January 8, 2018
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Says sky to pond, Do trees go off in search of happiness? Do stones? No, the pond replies. But see how the river runs — and how it would stay, if it could. When God When God was a little boy he threw a stone into a pond and that is the history of this world. When God was a little girl she invited everyone to tea and that […]
In my long life, have I ever really forgiven anyone? There is arrogance in yes, foolishness in no. And now I find the part of me that took offense is gone. I seem both sky and pond — and that is something to reflect upon. December 30, 2019 [ 620 ]
Parallel worlds exist and interact with our world, physicists say. And the lucky old man reading smiles at the thought of his family. December 28, 2019 Everywhere and All I was stretched out on my back for a rest yesterday, when I thought, Very well, then, here I am, on a bed, in a room, in a house, on a planet circling a sun, in a solar system, in […]
William Michaelian 