Owing to morning temperatures in the low-twenties, the birdbaths have seized up again. The air, meanwhile, is very dry, the streets are dry, and every bush and twig. Saturday afternoon, I was able to climb onto the roof with our electric blower and hundred-foot extension cord, and blow off all of the debris left behind by the fall storms. The fir needles were deep; the cones were plentiful; and there […]
Life’s too precious to spend it in the dread cycle of acquisition and protecting what we own. Still, our societies are based on this, and our nations set to war. The misunderstanding is simple: we’re not what we own. Nothing can be added, and nothing taken away, from a universal song. Yesterday Afternoon Laughing in the dentist’s chair The doctor and his assistant singing His wife reads vampire novels […]
A clear, chilly morning of thirty degrees. Out under the stars, I ran for the forty-second consecutive day, making six weeks of barefoot sandal running. I saw no one, and was met by only one car, which was driven by one of this country’s many thousands of “independent contractors” delivering packages. I’m about halfway through Melville’s Typee, the narrator of which has come to question who is truly civilized — […]
It’s much less what I’m reading, than the simple fact that I am reading, that I find remarkable. More than remarkable: holding a book in my hands, turning the pages, and making sense of what’s printed on those pages, is a miracle. How the books I read find their way to me, and come to a temporarily safe harbor within these walls, is a mystery. Though it appears that I’m […]
On the last day of the year, in a used bookstore we visit every so often in West Salem, I chanced upon an unread copy of a Library of America edition containing three works by Herman Melville, all having to do with the sea: Typee; Omoo; and Mardi. Priced at only eight dollars and fifty cents, the book was still in its original white slipcase, and its ribbon marker had […]
This morning, half an hour before sunrise, I heard two mourning doves: one across the street, calling from the neighbor’s fir tree; the other on the street south of ours, from the dense pine in front of a house sold a year or two ago by the elderly couple who used to live there. Early morning. Birds. Trees. And so the note I wrote August 1, 2018, already has that […]
This poem was written fifteen years after my father’s death. He was a good reader, and remembered what he read, but as an adult he wasn’t a reader of many books; certainly not of poems. Like so many of his generation, he read the daily newspaper from front to back. And like my mother, he encouraged his three children to read, and expected us to do well in school, which, […]
My reading life began early in childhood, with countless visits to our hometown library, the same library my mother frequented when she was growing up. I have no idea how many books I’ve read. I know others who have read more than I have, and who read more than I do, and who are better readers in terms of how much they can recall, and how well they can analyze […]
It’s hard to know who’s crazy here — the subject, the poet, or the reader. Likely all three; because we all hunger for beauty, and are able to find it in unique places, and experience it and share it in unique ways. Whether this is also a definition of wisdom, is for each of us to decide. We’ll be wrong either way. That, too, is our gift. In my own […]
Am I my own best, most attentive reader, or am I like so many others who write, and who somehow remain strangers to their own words, as if they are embarrassing and awkward to be around? Haste is the great enemy. If, while reading, I do not engage all of my senses and weigh each line on a scale of personal and universal truth, while being sure that, as it […]
William Michaelian 