A very warm afternoon, outside and in. It seems logical, natural, inevitable, that, as I age, I am moving steadily, inexorably, towards silence. The season holds sway, but the conclusion is the same any time of year. Towards word silence; journal silence; poem silence; grave silence. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; silence to silence. Emerged from silence, proceeding unto silence; never having left silence, forever part of silence. Loving […]
And now you dream yourself a cloud,when a little naked child lets go the stringof her balloon, so you won’t be alone. Recently Banned Literature, August 8, 2014 . [ 1179 ]
the watchman’s lantern sunlight on a heron’s bill across the river . [ 1102 ]
In the matter of a few hours, a trace of rain, just enough to dampen the surface of the soil, was enough to bring forth another wave of sunflower sprouts. Breaking through, they look like they’re leaping into the unknown, almost as if they’re parachuting skyward, and my up is their down. Is there anything I can imagine that isn’t rooted in my life experience, my observation, my reading, my […]
I record dreams as truthfully and faithfully as I can. In terms of accuracy, how successful I am varies from one attempt to the next, fiction and memory overlapping as they do. The form also varies. Some are set down in straightforward prose; others as poems; not a few are drawings and are rendered without words at all. There are even times when I do not realize I am recording […]
A little bit of coffee, a little bit of soap. Hand on the bell cord, eye on the rope. April 12, 2021 . Dream Fragment, 3:45 a.m. A young man, of sixteen or seventeen and a stranger to me, leads me to a table, atop which is a curious arrangement of small objects, seemingly of a scientific nature. “If I die,” he says quietly, and with the utmost reverence for […]
Let us not explain everything, that we may not explain ourselves away, into meaninglessness, or superficiality, which is far worse. . A Faraway Town Between the rows beside the mounds above the tombs he knows so well, the tombs so dark, the tombs so cool, that pull him down and bend him ’round one frayed shoelace at a time, one copper-colored eyelet, a faraway town (without any news) where no […]
The socks are of brown heirloom cotton, rising to the ankle, finished without dye, part kiss, part sigh. The shoes happened by, looking for a home. They wait in the closet by the door. Sometimes I hear them in the night, arguing with the whisk broom: Stop pacing. Stop waiting. Shh. Shh. When I open the door, they are mum. Each has a life, like the walls, the dark, the […]
The rain isn’t falling in huge amounts, but there’s enough of it every day to keep things glistening and drenched. There are piles of ice storm debris to attend to, but getting to them leaves deep footprints, where miniature lakes form, not in the shape of Italy’s boot, but in Oregon’s mud-and-moss-encrusted hiking shoe. And so that work waits — or, rather, the worker waits, while the debris does what […]
An ice storm. Large and small, the trees and shrubs, draped with icicles and encased in ice, are bowing, weeping, cracking, breaking. Flights of geese. Flocks of birds. February 13, 2021 . The Hobo’s Ice Jar An old scraggly hobo asked for water. But my wife and I had no water, because we were in the process of clearing out the kitchen. The cabinets were empty, the faucet was missing. […]
William Michaelian 