A grape on the tongue, and language is born. Or is it dream? Or is it memory? Emergency He was riding his bicycle slowly over the bumpy dirt road that ran between his father’s vineyard and the neighbor’s. It was late summer. The atmosphere was warm and still, and the air was heavy with the scent of ripening fruit. As he wobbled along, he noted with pleasure the tracks […]
All of Herman Melville’s poetry, complete in a beautiful, one thousand-page book — the new Library of America edition, out just days ago, is already in this reader’s hands. This is another of those projects I enjoy so well, like the slow and careful reading aloud of Thoreau’s fourteen-volume journal, which I have currently under way, Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and the complete works of other writers I have […]
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 […]
The flesh in dreams is as real as it seems. And this is a dream. Bookmark, Page 455, Poems, Notes, and Drawings Portent I heard a sound, turned, and saw my father approaching through the mist. He was smiling, as usual. “Your mother told me to come and get you,” he said, “so here I am. Are you ready?” I told him yes, that I was ready, and that […]
If this is a book I’m putting together, it’s already the length of a short novel — this in the space of a little more than five months. As meaningless as things like these are, I find them quite interesting. My first novel, A Listening Thing, was written in ninety days. And if I remember correctly, my second novel, The Smiling Eyes of Children, was written in fifty-four. These are […]
William Michaelian 