A smidgen of rain. Dry under the trees. The timeless scent of crushed dry leaves. It sounds almost like a recipe. And it is, for paradise, for calm, for peace, for sanity. Where have the lines gone, the edges, borders, and boundaries? To graveyards, every one. Another leaf is down. The Rain and the Dead We can count storms but not raindrops, wars, but not the dead falling thick […]
Eventually I’ll run out of material worth saving. It might be a few weeks or months from now, a year or two or ten — I really don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is that I’m going about this project in such a random manner. I write as the spirit moves me, and when that spirit reminds me of something else I’ve written, I dig it up, and […]
An exchange of letters, perhaps? Postcards? Wishes? Dreams? Or what shall it be? Autumn leaves? Between Us Walking in the mist reminds me that wherever I go my face arrives before me, so that when we meet again, love, my secrets will all have been revealed. . . . . And then will I be healed . . . [ 151 ]
The arrival of fall has me thinking about our closets again. The urge to dismantle the stacks of crated material, and to throw most of it away, has returned. Some of it, though, I have to keep: the old music books and sheet music from my piano-lesson days, for instance, and drawings our kids made. But the refuse of my writing life is another matter — the old redundant notebooks […]
Those bright-white buttons in green grass that remind you of a clown’s shirt and the way everyone laughs at his sadness except an old poet in the back row who swallows hard and says that’s fall for you and that kid in the long yellow bus on his way to love and loss and the moon And when the neighbor told me he’d scattered some grass seed where the […]
Fifteen words, seventeen syllables — this is one of several “yellow poems” I’ve found while looking through Poems, Slightly Used. It was written October 21, 2009, a bit further into autumn than we are now. But this year it seems the switch to fall has already been thrown. And if you happen upon this note in some other season, I hope love is all you know. Birches She laughs […]
Clouds, but no rain. It’s not that they’re stingy. Or early. Or late. Gray is their way of saying they have more thinking to do. And the time that it takes is the look on your face when we’re waiting, love. Such is fall. And somehow, we remember it all. And we will. And we are. And we do. [ 114 ]
William Michaelian 