As much as I like and am willing to live with the bits and pieces I’ve chosen thus far to preserve, it’s important to remember, for me, at least, that there are great swathes of writing and piles of drawings that clearly should not, and will not, see the light of day. I don’t mean to say it’s all junk. There are bright moments, mingled with poignant, self-defeating hints of […]
Here is another “yellow poem” from the old age of my youth. My father left us in 1995. For My Father Of the yellow in a wet fig leaf the ear makes sound of falling rain Poems, Slightly Used, October 12, 2010 [ 124 ]
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 […]
For each of the twelve hundred pages in my first website, I’m Telling You All I Know (2001-2011), I made a little drawing, occasionally in ink, but almost always with a school pencil, after which I scanned it into the computer and added it manually to the HTML page. Then I uploaded the page to the host server. Without exception, the drawing was done after the writing. The pages were […]
The ancient texts of solemn trees. Bird tracks at my feet. Late-night lights in the widow’s house. Lichens on headstones. Thrice-woven wool. Galaxies that resemble scattered straw. Notebooks filled. A wealth of steam. The luck of rice. dew in the dust on the old man’s mailbox he reads his letters twice [ 104 ]
This poem and Canvas 1,183, a drawing made earlier this year, look out and speak ever so softly from facing pages in the Fall 2018 issue of Akitsu Quarterly. Imagine, the journey from pixel to print, made in only eight years — about the same time it takes a snowflake to fall, and ash to turn a poet’s hair gray. Memento Mountain snow valley ash a hand a pen […]
Almost all of my writing is done very early in the morning. “Saving Grace” is no exception. And yet I remember, or think I remember, that upon its completion, I felt an entire day had passed, and that the day was a lifetime. Such is memory. Such is rain. Such is writing. Sometimes you must leave almost everything out, to keep anything in. Saving Grace Today it’s the rain, […]
In the brevity of my long experience — reading, writing, breathing, thinking — smoke is one of those magical words that is almost impossible to distinguish from the thing it represents. Like the sting of my youth and the gentle gathering of age, it finds its way everywhere, as color, in scent, in memory. And what I can’t quite fathom on the page because of it, I know the more […]
A stone in a bottomless pond — a sky so deep, my eye is a star. Poems, Slightly Used, November 23, 2010 [ 46 ]
Canvas 927 and Canvas 928 first appeared in Recently Banned Literature.
They were later included in the Fall 2017 issue of Akitsu Quarterly.
Another drawing and a very short poem will be published in the Fall 2018 issue.
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William Michaelian 
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