I run half a mile more. Sometimes I feel I can run forever. Then I realize I already have, and do, through the mountains, between the stars. I turn a few more pages, tho’ I’ve read all the books, and have been all the characters. And I write a few more words, in this, my present language, Tho’ I’ve already written them all, and said them all, and you’ve read […]
We broke the ice in the birdbaths and filled them with fresh water. The first drink was taken by a squirrel. Then a pair of juncos descended from the bare birches. They hopped around the rim, stopping for very quick small sips — stopping without stopping, you might say. More sun, more cold, not a drop of rain. The dry air inside makes the sinuses ache. My blood pressure was […]
Life’s too precious to spend it in the dread cycle of acquisition and protecting what we own. Still, our societies are based on this, and our nations set to war. The misunderstanding is simple: we’re not what we own. Nothing can be added, and nothing taken away, from a universal song. Yesterday Afternoon Laughing in the dentist’s chair The doctor and his assistant singing His wife reads vampire novels […]
Every winter, I think about rearranging the more than three thousand books and two dozen bookshelves in this room. But other than minor changes — a stack here, a stack there — it ends up staying the way it is: familiar, visually pleasing, organized according to no specific plan other than a theme or author here and there, or a type of binding. If I’m counting correctly, I acquired forty-two […]
They’re called The Asylum Poems for good reason. And as you read through them — each is but a few lines in length — you might see what I see now, almost twenty years since: a familiar stranger pacing a small room, each step a door, closed behind his back. You might see it even if you don’t read them. You might see yourself, too, because, if you look long […]
It gives me a good feeling to revisit such a positive, personal, universal poem. Though it was written more than eight years ago and I am indisputably that much older, I still feel, in contemplating the thoughts and images called forth, that a beautiful harvest is in. And I still feel gratitude, and call it a blessing and a symphony. Whatever your age, if you have yet to explore the […]
After reading On the Eighth Day, the question I ask myself is this: If my writing could be turned into loaves of bread, and be given to hungry people, would I embrace that miracle, or would I want to keep the writing as it is and let the people starve? In other words, would I cling to the fleeting image of myself as a writer, even at the expense of […]
If this is my calling, so be it. If it’s simply something I like or love to do, again, so be it. And yet, at the beginning of my Perspective statement, which was written a dozen or so years later, and has remained unchanged to this day, I say, Each word I write and line I draw is an artist’s statement — not because I am an artist, but because […]
And Man probably reveals more about me than it does the human condition, though I can’t separate myself from that condition, and wouldn’t care to if I could. I don’t want to see myself as something apart from everyone and everything else. If I’m lucky, I’ll rise as far as the condition allows, while it’s clear by this drawing I have already fathomed its depths. There’s a key element here: […]
As noted then in these pages, my brother, Kirk, died two years ago today — an interval which seems much more like one expansive, all-encompassing breath. I see, meanwhile, that it’s been almost a month since I last wrote. During that time, I’ve felt neither the urge nor the need. And I don’t feel it now. What I do feel is the arrival of spring. Why, then, am I writing? […]
William Michaelian 