A full pint basket of beautiful ripe fruit — I picked the last of our blueberries yesterday. In the evening, the first flight of geese. The gentle summer continues. By the front step, on the big rhododendron, next spring’s flower buds have already formed. Before lunch, I ate one slice of a fresh, sour, Gravenstein apple. I could feel the juice on its way down, spreading a tart panic. It […]
So old, memory failed, he’d forgotten he was ready for death — one last star at sunrise, just beyond his grasp. Joy! Bookmark, Page 470, Poems, Notes, and Drawings Miracles I sat on a rock in the shade, not far from the water’s edge. Three small boats were out, each carrying but one person. Two were floating with the current. The other, by means of an uneven-sounding outboard motor, […]
How beautiful, and how strange, the sense of continuity, harmony, and balance that keeps a lifetime of writing and reading suspended, as it were, or meaningfully afloat — such is memory — and as I hold my glass up to the light, I am surprised to find it still full. Ross Freeman He went to the window and closed the drapes. His typewriter on the table looked like an […]
Two years — since then, who knows how many times I’ve seen her grown children looking for worms in the wet grass after a rain. “Is that the man? Do you remember what Mama said?” “Yes. She said, You don’t have to be afraid of him.” All of This the nights are growing longer and the robin watching from her nest in the fig tree leaves fall in a […]
At the rate I’m going, steady though it may be, it will take me several years to finish reading all fourteen volumes of Thoreau’s journal. I hope I have those years. But if I don’t, I’m happy to have had those leading up to them. And when I say hope, I mean I’m willing to live them if they’re given me, and that I understand very well they might not […]
It can happen any time — one instant you’re in the warm-water wash, and the next you’re a sheet on the line. four hands two cups of tea table a dream pot a bouquet memory For Robert, Mark, and Stanley, June 29, 2019 [ 435 ]
Well before daylight, in the sublime quiet, reading the letters of a thoughtful young man who later lost his life in the Civil War at the age of twenty-nine: Charles Russell Lowell, nephew of the great writer and poet, James Russell Lowell. Then, suddenly, raindrops — so few in number it reminds me of my mother sprinkling water on her ironing. June 26, 2019 The Sunlight on My Mother’s […]
My father always said that no one taught him to swim, that he simply jumped into the wide mossy ditch with all the other boys and learned then and there on his own. He did not say he had already learned by watching, while dancing naked with glee on the bank in the hot summer sun. Some of the same vineyards that were there in his childhood were there in […]
A soft lead pencil, a fingertip — the brush a mind,
the mind a memory, memory a fallen flower.
Canvas 565 — June 28, 2015
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The art of making it rain, I learned from my father. That I am here to explain, I learned from my mother. July Rain Dying is such old work — I settle the dust in our yard with a hose. Poems, Slightly Used, July 5, 2009 [ 423 ]
William Michaelian 