William Michaelian

Poems, Notes, and Drawings

Tag Archive for ‘Art’

Canvas 824 — Patience

Canvas 824 — January 17, 2017

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, […]

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The Old Road

One Hand Clapping February 2004

Who knows why, but this morning I find myself thinking about jackrabbits, vineyards, and dust. These are but a few significant emblems of my childhood, which, rather than ending, gradually became the insanity I labor under today. Polliwogs, crawdads, slow-moving mossy water. The sound of our tractor in the distance, the tractor and my father pursued by a cloud of blackbirds looking for bugs, seeds, and worms. As I look […]

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Wisdom Remains

It needed many years, but when I finally realized that as a writer I would not be famous or successful in a way that would pay the bills, and when I understood what a lucky thing that was, the self-imposed burden of the idea fell away, leaving me light, free, ready, and glad for whatever may come. Painful as it was, I do not regret the process; I am not […]

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The Artist With the Frozen Teeth

How quickly my life is passing — as if each day it finds new means of escape, and is even now leaking out through my hair ends and fingertips — a joyful tingling sensation, light beyond light, darkness of a depth unimaginable — new birth, a second coming of age, my honeyed childhood on fresh warm bread just as the sun goes down — voices; wings; a strange starry canvas; […]

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Canvas 499 — Little Boy Blue

Canvas 499 — December 25, 2014

  Little Boy Blue It’s my pleasure and good fortune to work every day of the year — to set down a few words, to draw, or to otherwise tend to the bookish details of my elderly childhood. But the word work should fool no one; I use it only to distinguish from the rest of the play that constitutes my daily life. For I’m as silly and eager about […]

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