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 […]
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 […]
However patiently and faithfully I try to record the quotidian, I find it becomes charged with memory and dream, as if these states of mind or being are infused with a fine mist, like that which heightens the illusion of any natural scene. Set down the most common of items, and it buds and flowers before the sentence ends. Melody Words are living things. Sometimes, through ignorance and arrogance, […]
Is the early-morning tapping of woodpeckers a form of communication? Is it song?
Is the mind’s ear the source of an echo?
And what of the mind’s eye? Is that where we go when we’re gone?
Canvas 1,176 — March 14, 2018
Anonymous
I see you on a swing in a doorway
between two failing timbers,
caught by an echo
in the black night beyond.
Recently Banned Literature, May 23, 2011
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I used to have dreams about work not done. I was behind on the farm, I was late, the necessity and importance of the job had completely slipped my mind. An example: suddenly it was April or May, and I realized I had forgotten to prune ten whole acres of vines. Always, or almost always, the dreams culminated in a feeling of guilt and shame. It has been many years […]
There is, for me, the feeling that they have always existed,
and have only been waiting for me to notice.
Their patience is a lesson in itself.
Knowing we may travel a time together,
and that they will likely outlive me, are things I love.
And so, if this is drawing, it’s from a deep, hidden well.
A reservoir of dreams. The fragility of health.
Three for the Road — April 2, 2019
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Canvas 1,234
They arrived almost immediately after I had awakened
from a surprisingly deep after-lunch sleep.
Or maybe they were already here,
and I am the one who arrived.
Or it might be all of us were away,
and fate arranged our simultaneous return.
March 31, 2019
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And then there are the unremembered nights, the unwritten nights,
and the countless ways the dream of light transcends them.
Dream of Light — January 29, 2019
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I thought I had better call my old friend to see how he was doing,
forgetting for the moment he is dead, yet knowing it too,
and knowing I was forgetting, and knowing I knew.
Dream Fragment — January 28, 2019
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I love the droughts in writing, the minutes that seem like hours, the deserts and barren fields, the dust bowls, the great depressions, the jalopies abandoned by the road like these hobo wayward notes. I love raindrops that take years to fall and then land acres apart, if they land at all. I love the peace of a dry well, the coyote’s howl, free for the taking. Dream The […]
William Michaelian 