If I truly love the absence of pain, how can I not also love its presence? I am not above life and unique to choose. In this transient human disguise, I cannot even reliably, or consistently, distinguish between the two. Indeed, it might well be, and it might be well, that they are one. April 5, 2019 Coming of Age A light supper, a thunderstorm, and a sturdy hut. […]
Where pain is unexplained, I liken it to love. I liken it to childhood, too. No? Isn’t it like looking deeply into brown eyes, Into green, into gray, into blue? Where pain is unexplained, I see sweet ripples on the pond. If swimming is to lose, is drowning living on? I think it must be so, where love is true, And pain is unexplained. February 27, after an early-morning walk […]
The body at work — its processes humming, oxygen, the brain, the blood, the ebb and flow of star matter, day and night, moon shadows, waterfalls — and somehow, from somewhere deep in the tickled tissue and folds, there arises the familiar notion that I am bothered or inconvenienced, that I am in pain, that I am unfairly punished, that I am ennobled, to the point of addiction, the crutch […]
It’s that almost in the last verse that stops me. Without it, the poem would be entirely different. As for the truth of the two possibilities, it might be best to dwell on it, or in it, for a century or two; because, as one’s understanding of pain changes, one’s notion of time does as well. In fact, we might come to realize that it doesn’t exist at all. […]
William Michaelian 