What I know is not what I think I know. What I know is a secret I am told. That the secret is in a language I do not understand is not as sad as it might seem. For if the language was one I understood, there would be no need for words like these. And poems would not fall from trees. The End of Me cherry blossoms will […]
The first warm weather, and suddenly the street is full of people who have been in hiding for the last five months, blinking, stretching, squinting, strolling, looking like pale ghosts. Who are these two children peddling by, and why have I never seen them before? Where do they live? I smile. My smile isn’t returned. Instead they stare. And I suppose to them I must look like a hermit down […]
Yesterday morning, the snow around North Falls posed no problem, but the ice formed by traffic on the hiking paths most certainly did. And so, after a bit of skating, we got back into the car and drove on to South Falls. Conditions there were much better. A little less altitude and a little more sun made all the difference. The paths were mostly bare. We had no trouble walking […]
From a note written April 15, 2009: The other evening, while eating leftovers, I told my son that we should get rid of his cat and have a pet tarantula instead. I said we could keep it in a terrarium, and in the terrarium we could create a desert scene with dry sand and a narrow highway running through it — in honor of Bob Dylan, Highway 61. Somewhere along […]
This bright frosty morning, the world smells like a million lonely breakfasts. “November Postcard” Recently Banned Literature, November 16, 2008 Not a Romance, 1974 When I was hanging around at the college, there was a girl with very long hair and pale white skin. We met in passing many times, but we never spoke. She was beautiful in a simple way, like clean sheets drying on a clothesline beside […]
The weather term wintry mix makes me think of a salad without cucumbers and tomatoes, with carrots and cabbage and kale and lettuce of various curls and crinkles and hues, and perhaps an orange slice or two. On the street, though, with the wind in my face while climbing the hill, I’m not met by tangy vegetables and apple cider vinegar, but with rain and ice and snow. Clumps and […]
Canvas 1,230 — February 28, 2019
Winterwood
From the bare lilac,
the hummingbird
eyes the crocus;
that’s what I know.
Poems, Slightly Used, February 23, 2010
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Does it take self-discipline to let the body work its daily cures and wonders, or simply patience, understanding, attention, gratitude, and love? And where do these things dwell, if not in the body? answered the dove. Sore Feet For the willow tree philosophy is one more leaf on the water. Songs and Letters, March 5, 2008 [ 295 ]
This has been a winter of books, and the kind of simple earthly pleasures that are priceless and free — a winter of clouds and ice and sun, of forest paths and waterfalls, of vanilla pages and chamomile grass and moss — a winter of Blake, Thoreau, and Don Quixote, of diaries and letters, and of all that lasts beyond its past and lights the present tense. And it’s not […]
What are the great questions? And if I were asked them one by one, what would be my answer? Life, death, God, love, philosophy, religion, good, evil, war — would it merely be a recycled version of what others have said, a hearsay ego-bath arrived at second-hand, or would I offer something entirely new and of the moment, a revelation of an exploration without expectation, ever free in flight with […]
William Michaelian 
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