Maybe it’s not a question of whether, where, or when the flesh and the imagination meet, but how long it’s been since you’ve joined them. After the Bath you draw with your fingertip on warm naked skin and then call the poem a rose Recently Banned Literature, December 30, 3016 [ 604 ]
A light rain . . . tiny bird high in the branches of the western juniper . . . they are as joyfully necessary to each other as they are to me . . . and perhaps, just perhaps, as I am to them . . . including the rain. It’s easy to hug someone you love. But did you know that if you hug someone you don’t love, love […]
I rarely think of things as being themselves alone — a year a year, a man a man, a word a word, a poem a poem — a love a love, a moan a moan. Of All the Blues Of all the blues that grace this world, I love gray the best — dream-blue, rain-blue, a lake blue by gray-night coming to dawn, eye-blue, flight-blue, name-blue graying gray alone […]
I would rather spend the day in a country graveyard than in a shopping mall. Is that so strange? I would rather handle old books and antiques than plastic merchandise. Does that make me odd? Is it obsolete to think the finest jewels are raindrops hanging from a naked limb? And that if there ever was, is, or will be a god, she is here to love me back again? […]
If I have any wish or dream at all, it is to know at death what I knew when I was born; the quest is love; the rest is now. December 2, 2019 [ 588 ]
A winter afternoon spent trying this word and that word and erasing them both, until the room I am in is given to darkness — even death agrees — if not with the method, then at least with the progress. Given Suddenly a ripe plum and how her sweet flesh aches in the mouth in memory of melted snow running down a country road [ 587 ]
When you see young children living and working their beautiful miracles, do you smile and say, They are something at that age, or, We are something at that age? They, or we — the difference, I think, is a great one, and tells much about you. The same might be asked of how you view those who are far ahead of you in years. Because the very young and the […]
You’re familiar, of course, with the tissue guards that grace the title pages and illustrations in many old books. Like veils on faces and mists in the grove, they protect what is tender and innermost more surely than any fence or wall, or lock and key. If we are to know anything, or anyone, we must understand the connection between hearts and fingertips. Love thrives by its very weightlessness. A […]
I am here and I am not here — what better way to describe this early-morning walk through the fog, accompanied by what seems, and what might very well be, my almost tangible presence after death? The sublime vagueness of it, the feeling that, if it is necessary, it must be in unfathomable ways, the dawning of innocence with the coming of age. I will not tarry. Life is the […]
Is the slug in the grass aware of the bee in the garden? An ambulance roars by and stops at a house up the street. Too late. A hearse pulls away. And why, in the time of crisis, did I feel nothing beyond my apple and persimmon for lunch? Why do I not know when a homeless man nurses his frostbitten feet in front of the mission downtown? Are my […]
William Michaelian 