Once, during my childhood, I caused the death of a bird. Or I was caused to cause it, to drive a lesson home — That fallen from a tree, a sparrow is a rainbow on the ground. Sunlight Stored In Bone Sunlight stored in bone — life, limb, bird, song, leaf, gone, flown. Recently Banned Literature, December 2, 2014 [ 403 ]
The dry grass of my ambition has a beauty all its own.
All the more so with the fences down.
And the graveyard overgrown.
Portland, Oregon — December 1988
Before Me, the Past
Before me, the past speeds ahead.
It arrives, I know not when.
Behind me, the future is silent.
It knows that I am dead.
Pity, there is no grief in starlight.
Mercy, cries for the unborn.
Duty, is a failed science.
Love, walks alone.
You show me a sign.
A bright, fathomless smile.
As if there were, anything.
As if we were, real.
As if, rainbows give birth to children.
And they do: rainbows, and strawberries.
Fallen angels, white as any snowflake.
Black as an eye in a song.
Blue, as when light returns.
Green, because everything is so damn silly.
Honeyed as any flower.
Or as the scent and color of skin.
Intimate, as graveyard stone.
Whispers, with cold gray fingertips.
Wet shoes: where have I been?
And how did you find me?
A siren in a cityscape.
Moonlight, on a table.
Perhaps, or, simply, fate.
A wet sponge by the sink.
A leaf, a candle.
An unexpected need.
Poems, Slightly Used, November 21, 2010
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My first thought this morning: If I slept like a rock, it is a rock that dreams. My second thought: If I slept like an angel, it could mean anything. No Foothold No foothold on the brooding rock, or memory of the climb, only joy in stepping off, and these awkward wings of mine. Recently Banned Literature, August 7, 2014 [ 395 ]
I love how a trace of rain transforms a garden, even one that is already doing very well. I see the same in the neighbors and in myself. Our greens are more vivid and intense in the charged atmosphere; our purples and reds draw notice from the hummingbirds. I wonder now if, in all my years of writing, I have ever used the word aura. I think not. But it […]
On the road. After sleeping well in a strange bed, I think of dead friends and family members, and how, since I carry them with me, they too have traveled. The flickering lights of boats anchored offshore, like the lowest of low stars. Along the steep wooded path that leads to the sand, wild cucumbers already in bloom, stars for rabbits and carpenter ants. The ocean sky at dawn — […]
Even after his stroke and up to his death on January 6, 1990, at the age of ninety-three, my father’s father never did forget who we were. Many at the Armenian Home in Fresno, where he chose to spend the last few years of his life, weren’t as fortunate. This short poem was inspired by our visits there, and by the vineyards we used to pass on the way. “At […]
However patiently and faithfully I try to record the quotidian, I find it becomes charged with memory and dream, as if these states of mind or being are infused with a fine mist, like that which heightens the illusion of any natural scene. Set down the most common of items, and it buds and flowers before the sentence ends. Melody Words are living things. Sometimes, through ignorance and arrogance, […]
A Growing Fool On the rare occasions it was warranted, I was thrilled to wear a tie my father had long since banished to a far corner of the closet, so much out of style it was that it was a new style all its own, wide and long enough to serve as vest or bib, wild enough to please the choosiest of adolescent clowns. I had big shoes. […]
Would I rather be peeled like an onion, opened like a pomegranate, or eaten like a fig? The answer changes from day to day. And yet if you were to ask me now, this moment, I would say all three. Or I might be a walnut, whose heart is exposed with the breaking of day. My grandfather had a pecan tree. The jays would pick up the nuts, and then […]
In his journal, around the year 1850, Thoreau writes of the gradual disappearance of wild apples, saddened by the realization that a generation hence, they would be virtually unknown in the land. They were planted anywhere it was thought they might survive — in odd corners, along roadsides, against walls — and left to fend for themselves — like us, it occurs to me now, a lesson in abundance and […]
William Michaelian 
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