Yesterday afternoon I saw a great brown hawk, perhaps three hundred feet from the ground, standing on air, facing a cold spring wind, with its wings open wide. When he allowed it to take him, even eternity was surprised. Dark gray clouds. Rain. Clear blue sky. While I was out, I could not always see him, but I could hear his cries. A storm in the pine: two startled mourning […]
The rain isn’t falling in huge amounts, but there’s enough of it every day to keep things glistening and drenched. There are piles of ice storm debris to attend to, but getting to them leaves deep footprints, where miniature lakes form, not in the shape of Italy’s boot, but in Oregon’s mud-and-moss-encrusted hiking shoe. And so that work waits — or, rather, the worker waits, while the debris does what […]
Street by street, power is being restored. Last night at nine o’clock, it was thirty-five degrees. This morning at three-thirty, it was forty-five. Yesterday morning, we viewed the destruction around town. The ice storm has closed roads, brought down wires, felled mighty oaks, split cedars, ravaged birches, and crushed cars and rooftops with mossy limbs. In the afternoon, the roar of chainsaws filled the air. They will be running for […]
Sometimes, as I sit here writing in the dark, I feel as if my hands belong to someone else working just beyond the veil — a parallel realm in which objects roam free of any given meaning, and the sound of a passing train — I hear it now — is that someone’s remembered childhood. “Arrival” Poems, Slightly Used, February 18, 2010 . Revival . . . and now / […]
Fennel seed tea with just a bit of blackberry honey: a timely cure for all the physical and mental ailments of which I remain unaware. On the path beyond Goose Lake, we came to a place where a tree was down, blocking our way. Just inside the network of slender bare branches, there were two brown rabbits. They kept their eyes on us as we made the long way around. […]
The sound of rain. The blessèd certainty of it — think as I will, believe as I will, act as I will, the rain will fall on my grave, and that is a blessing too: a blessing to the stone, should I have one, a blessing to the soft green grass that grows over me. And for an epitaph, these two words will do: Listening. Still. May they describe you. […]
After two inches of rain, these lungs are best understood as sails, and this body a creaking, yet willing, ship — the air is that promising, that fresh, that clean. Seagulls on the city streets; the homeless, some just waking, others still asleep. The great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn — if these clouds persist, will Christmas still come? History changes with the wind. It is the wake of the […]
A warm steady rain. The dust all washed away, the tea made, the earth peeled and set out upon a plate, this world is the perfect meal for every child who comes to play. “Please stay.” But they do not. Nor can we. She folds the cloth. Sets the seal. Ends the day. December 20, 2020 . [ 962 ]
More than halfway through, I’m not quite sure how I feel about George Schuyler’s satirical novel, Black No More. It’s certainly not without humor, and not without a large measure of truth. In the clever guise of science fiction, it is, in effect, a witty, sharply drawn editorial cartoon on American race relations. That I find the bitter edge of its caricature unappealing, says as much about me as it […]
Once inside and away from the chilly weather, the jade plants in their big clay pots turned quickly to face the tall south window. The glass is cool this time of year, as the fairy tale sunlight calls to them through the open wooden blinds. The smaller of the two pots holds three plants made from cuttings several years ago, taken from my mother’s twenty-year-old plant, the trunk of which […]
William Michaelian 