When one posts blog entries almost daily for ten years, there are inevitable changes — in mood, certainly, but also in subject matter, style, and approach. And yet, written as they are by the same hand, they are familiar and recognizable. It’s a bit like visiting a waterfall during different times of the year: now the music is heightened; now the rocks are more exposed; and while the distance from […]
Should you ask what it is I’m trying to express, I would answer, I’m not trying. And to confess? Maybe this: Not flying. Not dying. [ 53 ]
I think I’ve already mentioned somewhere that I tend to forget poems almost as soon as they’re written. It’s interesting, because so many, like this one, are memory-driven, and each verse is its own childhood or family album. Rainbows and Windmills Sometimes we leave with rainbows in our pockets, and sometimes we travel without them, knowing there are always rainbows about; and yet a crumpled rainbow is its own […]
Night in bloom The night in bloom, as if the moon both meant to stay, and go; just so, my hat, my coat, my soul. Recently Banned Literature, November 8, 2014 [ 51 ]
1 at the center of which is Man, said the woman unto him, laughing, her symphony a breath of hands. 2 There were walls in those days: 3 The cotton patch on one side, impossible to mend; her father at the window, plotting murder; her mother knitting sandwiches: 4 Bolls, half open, scratchy to retrieve; the failed blood of […]
This old dictionary, in full bloom on my work table. A petal falls: solitude, noun. Songs and Letters, August 18, 2008 [ 48 ]
The stage isn’t really a stage; but then again the sky isn’t the sky either, unless there happens to be a light rain falling, dripping from a pine or from the edge of a tall gray building. Dawn, or at least a suggestion of it. Reminder: Talk to the person who handles the lighting. The cast consists of two characters, who for the entire play alternate between looking skyward and […]
A stone in a bottomless pond — a sky so deep, my eye is a star. Poems, Slightly Used, November 23, 2010 [ 46 ]
Surely you can imagine the street, the stones, the carriages, the table, the coffee, and the coming revolution. Or maybe you’re just thinking about an old friend, because today is his birthday. You remember sitting near the curb, beneath a tree, and how your cup somehow became full of tiny spring spiders, but not his. And then, the last time you were to meet, you waited alone, not knowing he […]
Written in 2015 and first published as a standalone blog, I refer affectionately to As Is as a “free-form essay” without quite knowing what the term means. The piece, divided into nine parts, or verses, is as much poem as it is essay, as much memoir as it is poem, and as much a celebration of life and language as all three. Its several references to Stephen, Mary, and my […]
William Michaelian 