Captured in the same breath, so to speak, as “So Many Angels,” I wrote and published two things the following morning. Both strike me as worth preserving. This is the first. Between the Ivy and the Big Rhododendron Yesterday morning in the kitchen we were talking about our old cat, Joe, and how at peace with the world he was in his declining years, which he spent in our […]
They’ll say we knew each other, that we spoke to each other in poems, and that when at long last evening fell, we were solemn, we were still. December 4, 2019. Evening. Imagine a Word Imagine a word deep in its image, and a page in an ice age burning for warmth. Imagine a tongue that is fire, before learning to speak. Imagine the ashes, and what they are […]
If I have any wish or dream at all, it is to know at death what I knew when I was born; the quest is love; the rest is now. December 2, 2019 [ 588 ]
A winter afternoon spent trying this word and that word and erasing them both, until the room I am in is given to darkness — even death agrees — if not with the method, then at least with the progress. Given Suddenly a ripe plum and how her sweet flesh aches in the mouth in memory of melted snow running down a country road [ 587 ]
To say with dying breath, Yes, and write no less. November 23, 2019 [ 580 ]
I am here and I am not here — what better way to describe this early-morning walk through the fog, accompanied by what seems, and what might very well be, my almost tangible presence after death? The sublime vagueness of it, the feeling that, if it is necessary, it must be in unfathomable ways, the dawning of innocence with the coming of age. I will not tarry. Life is the […]
Flying and falling in dreams is not uncommon, I know. Although it’s been years, I have fallen and flown in many of my own. But the falling was always a good thing, and the landings lucky, if not sublime — soft meadows, gentle slopes, white clouds — a blessing in the face of unexplained dangers. This story, though, is not about that kind of falling. Then again, maybe it is. […]
Winter Poems. It’s a slender volume, and its design is somewhat crude. But what does it matter now? Did it matter then? No. It was a joy to behold, and to see in my mother’s hands. Now I find it on her shelf, between Harper Lee and The Grapes of Wrath. Life is like that. So is death. All is good. Nothing blooms by half. So Begins December There’s […]
If this is the letter O,
I can only wonder about the rest of the alphabet,
and what brings on these spells.
The Letter O — August 26, 2019
In a Vast White Space
A little boy, with a little apple and sticky hands,
busy the spirits about him, busy the wind,
many the voices, solemn, joyous,
in a vast white space,
written in plain white words,
a white ball chased by a wide white hound,
an alphabet of snow,
and you, with your funny little arrows,
ink-tipped, turned upon yourself,
in a vast white space, an apple,
turning red.
Recently Banned Literature, June 2, 2014
(written on the nineteenth anniversary of my father’s death)
[ 495 ]
In his journal, Emerson writes of walking with Hawthorne, talking with Thoreau, Carlyle’s latest book, and Tennyson’s new poems. In mine, I write of you, in terms of my own plain self. And this is our wealth: that we are each a funny blend of science and superstition, of pain, nerve, and luck. And this is our grief — the loss of dear Waldo, Emerson’s five-year-old son. August 4, 2019 […]
William Michaelian 