Picking up a few wind-downed birch and fir branches, I found out just how soggy the backyard is. Each step was accompanied by a luscious squish — two words you don’t see together very often — the result of the frequent rains we’ve been having. This didn’t stop me, though, from making a fair beginning of the annual pruning of our fig tree, which is a fair-sized job requiring the […]
Well, that’s enough about ants, or whatever it is I was writing about. And anyway, we can be glad they’re not cockroaches. Yet I remember my father’s uncles and aunts using the term cockroach endearingly, with a smile that also signified ample affection for the nephew they’d known from birth and watched grow up on their sister and brother-in-law’s Depression-era farm — the sister and brother-in-law being my father’s parents: […]
As funny as it seems, I was once a chubby cherub, a 1950s Raphael, who weighed thirty pounds at a year. There’s a picture in our sitting room that proves it, a smiling baby of nine months propped up by his own sweet girth, rolls at his wrists, and a twinkling smile. No wings — they never quite developed. There was only a minor scapular deformity, or perhaps conformity, to […]
Where Dragonflies Sleep starts my memory in so many agreeable directions, it would take hours to account for them all, if I ever came to the end. This brings to mind a question: is my memory infinite? Is it even possible to know? And what of ancestral memory, cultural memory, bodily memory, and the collective memory of our kind? And isn’t instinct a form of memory which, having existed for […]
I’ve just noticed for the first time that this true event reads like a dream — in fact, more like a dream than some of the dreams I’ve recorded. Now, what do you suppose that means? And what does it mean that the memory of the event also seems like a dream? Does it mean memory, in general, is a dream? When I say, No, this really happened, do I […]
Easy, comfortable, perhaps even comforting — there’s nothing provocative or challenging here, no trauma or turmoil, only the familiar voice of someone remembering, imagining, reliving episodes from his childhood and beyond. Writing for writing’s sake. Writing to find out what might surface that day, as one day follows another, and the nights with their twitches and dreams, while a vast amount remains out of reach — or seems to, because […]
I was climbing the hill this morning, when I heard a jogger behind me, coming along with heavy steps, a kind of heel-slapping motion that hurt just to listen to — and up he came, slowly passing me, and he was in pain. Then he climbed the steps of the house at the top of the hill, checked his watch, and went inside. About this time, “Miss Kitty,” the little […]
This poem was written fifteen years after my father’s death. He was a good reader, and remembered what he read, but as an adult he wasn’t a reader of many books; certainly not of poems. Like so many of his generation, he read the daily newspaper from front to back. And like my mother, he encouraged his three children to read, and expected us to do well in school, which, […]
At this late date, Verses strikes me as a kind of modern-day Genesis. Of course it’s a work of memory, and is therefore autobiographical. In its making, the images arose in abundance, each seemingly rife with its own hints and suggestions, until all I could do was hang on for the ride, thinking, If this is Genesis, then I want to read the whole Bible. But for that to happen […]
The dictionary in question is Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, published by G. & C. Merriam Company in 1924. It weighs just under fifteen pounds; the front cover is frayed and attached by only a few threads. I’ve since acquired older dictionaries, published early in the nineteenth century, in English and Spanish, and others of a more recent date, in French and German. Armenian, Japanese, and Russian […]
William Michaelian 