You’re reading about a storm during a storm, and then, shivering, you look up. Much to your surprise, you find the trees calm, the street quiet, and the lamplight unwavering. You look back at your book: a mute brick: ink: paper: binding. You decide to rest your eyes. You close them. Here it is again! Here comes the wind! It’s wild out. It’s wild in. And it only ends when […]
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 […]
The widest embrace is sweet anonymity. A star explained it to me. To live is to burn. And to love is to live brightly. “Sweet Anonymity”Recently Banned Literature, February 23, 2018 Canvas 1,159February 24, 2018 . [ 1030 ]
Should I fall asleep and never waken — but what if that has already happened, and this life I have lived, and am living still, is but an instant of the dreamy outcome? . Old Man Winter Daylight spilling from his tattered sack takes all night to reach the ground. I’m a penny on a railroad track. Choo-choo. Choo-choo-chooooooo. Poems, Slightly Used, November 26, 2010 . [ 952 ]
On a misty June morning in 1853, Thoreau almost literally stumbled on a giant mushroom or toadstool, a fungus of massive proportions which he likened to an umbrella or parasol. It was sixteen inches tall, about seven inches across at the top, with a trunk about an inch in diameter. To his surprise, he found it growing on an exposed hillside. He took it with him to town, careful to […]
Does my life matter? I am part of life. If life matters, I matter. If life does not matter, I do not matter. Either way, I live: I am part of the miracle, even if it is not a miracle. The rest — the years, the words, the little personal details — is simply my way of saying how beautiful life seems to me. It would be self-centered to assume […]
Some of us are loved into existence. Some are hated into existence. Some are conceived as pawns in a game. Some are born of hope, or grief, others of disinterest, selfishness, ignorance, boredom. Some are born of brutal possession and unbridled lust. And yet, however it is brought about, our arrival is a living symbol which transforms and transcends its cause. And our death? Some of us are loved away, […]
Life is incredibly generous. It gives us each our abilities, perceptions, and experiences, along with endless opportunities to come together and share for our mutual benefit what we have learned. And though we often use this gift as a means to conquer or to otherwise gain some kind of petty advantage, life never changes its attitude towards us. It gives us children; it gives us love; it gives us a […]
The park by the river is now a vast dried flower arrangement, mixed ever so lightly with Queen Anne’s Lace, mostly in its ornamental seed stage. Instead of sweetness, pollen, and a hum in the air, the hushed atmosphere is ripe and beyond; there is dust, there is decay, almost as if heaven has heard our voices, and reluctantly looked away. The berries have been picked; the hops harvest is […]
We hear it said that words are symbols, as if in a sense they were lined up on one side, with reality on the other, and us in between — dirty things tainted by their own meanings, useful as a daily sort of common currency, but basically crippled as a means of expressing life in its great profundity and mystery, which are best trusted to silence. This is very much […]
William Michaelian 
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