Sacred
Words are stones worn smooth by lips. Imagine being kissed like this. Upon your breast, against my chest. Caressed by mist and fingertips where meaning is. . [ 925 ]
Tag Archive for ‘Poems’
For You, Love
You will forgive an old man, won’t you, his worn out poems, like shoes, by the door? Twenty-six degrees. An all-night freeze. The early morning sunlight upon the frosted fig leaves is causing them to fall in yellow clumps and bunches, their soft rattle audible through the partly open window. And the living, breathing orchard floor, inches deep with hands and stems, made in timely session by a single tree, […]
Canvas 468 — Not Without Laughter
Langston Hughes’ll cure your blues — give em to you too. Say you don’t want em?but you do — you do, like all the boys and girls. Greasy cold fish sandwich,box a crackerjacks — his trumpet and his banjo’ll cut you through and through. Twister blew his front porch then set it in a field — kingdom of a front porch,flat dab in that field. Blew his door off like […]
Thirty-One Hath October
It was good to see the little row of pumpkins leading to the front door of our daughter’s house, one for each member of the family. In the cool, misty morning, without touching them, I knew exactly what they would feel like, their deep grooves, their dry, rugged stems, their warts and lumps. And I thought, ever so briefly, of what it might be like to be a pumpkin whisperer, […]
Canvas 1,086 — Cold Mountain
Cold mountain. Blue dawn. White wings. Ancient times were not so long ago. Those to come? What will they bring? And whose are these bare feet? Canvas 1,086November 8, 2017 . [ 912 ]
Fall Postcard
The dogwood is a beautiful red this year. If I were to make myself invisible and walk up to it ever so slowly, and then give the tree a shake, birds would scatter in every direction, a fluttering eruption of bright grosbeaks and chickadees there for the seed. Then, seeing nothing, they would soon return, some from the cedar, some from the maple, some from the birch. And I would […]
Nicotine
Many years ago, in our old hometown, there was a Japanese man in his nineties who had smoked cigarettes all of his adult life and loved smoking them still, all with no apparent harm to his health. There are people like that, people who can live on terrible, unhealthy diets, or who can consume alcohol in amounts that would make others ill, and yet thrive. As the story goes, with […]
Opposites
Living shadows, and the solid dreams they cast — The cedar and the lamp post, the school boy and the cloud: The perfect shroud — as if Cain had smiled at Abel, And Abel — had wept — and bowed. . [ 904 ]
Child With a Lantern in a Dream
Yesterday afternoon, the deep wet grass in front of the house was so green it made the sun smile — a wonderful thing, considering what the sun sometimes has to look down upon, even if it is not a person, and is, as many adults believe, just a star. October 18, 2020 . Child With a Lantern in a Dream Now you can see, Mr. Sun, that there is nothing […]
William Michaelian 