2001
That this lumpy old drawing is dear to my heart needs no explanation.
For ten long, short, memorable, forgetful, eventful years,
it lit the right-hand column on the news page of my first website,
I’m Telling You All I Know. Now it is here.
My Father’s Old Chair
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Somewhere between 1965 and 1968, a box of fifty Santa Fe Fairmont cigars cost eight dollars at the liquor store next to United Market. The price for a transistor radio battery was nineteen cents — three cents more than a single cigar. I was too young then to buy cigars. But I smoked them, indirectly, when my father lit one. Back then, he smoked several a day. But he quit […]
The poems grouped here were written in a nine-day period near the close of 2007 and comprise the whole of Volume 17 of Songs and Letters. To me, each word they contain is a kind of love letter. Is it any wonder, then, that, by the very act of reading them, I imagine you tying a ribbon around the whole sweet bundle? The Oldest Poem The oldest poem, […]
The Asylum Poems came into being in 2007 while I was taking care of my mother, who was battling Alzheimer’s Disease. The cycle of twenty short poems comprises the whole of Volume 15 of Songs and Letters, a much larger work begun in 2005 and completed in 2009. The poems were written early in the morning at my mother’s house, in a small bedroom facing the overgrown backyard. Fir trees, […]
This poem was written early in the morning one year ago today. It was published on Recently Banned Literature and shared on Facebook. If Not Tomorrow Then Today Sometimes I think of the bodies of friends and loved ones motionless in their graves — my mother, my father, our old neighbor the beekeeper, and even our faithful old hounds — and I feel a beautiful harvest is in, call […]
October 28, 2010 A child’s doll has died. At his request, I ask his mother for permission to conduct a funeral service in a language no one understands. This she grants. The doll is in a shoe box, beneath a fastened lid. Sunlight finds us in the street outside. A lone trumpet: inside the box, the doll begins to sing. December 21, 2010 My grandfather, alive again and in […]
Or the time after the war my father walked the horse and plow several miles to the north side of town and another farm to do a job for two dollars — that plow there behind the house, surrounded by next year’s bluebells, if you can imagine them — or him, smiling at his good fortune and at the vineyard beyond — less one brother. Or just the other day, […]
William Michaelian 