I’m thinking about reading The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham. The book was mailed to me by a poet-acquaintance in 2011, while he and his wife were in the American Southwest during their extensive travels around the U.S. In 2010, he shipped me a generous gift of 173 books, some of which can be seen in the photo below. As often happens with fellow bloggers, we never met in […]
Five in the morning. Seventy degrees. A light dew. Is there a way to separate memory from smell? It seems one is dry grass, and the other is ripening fruit. Shall we ask the toes? Is there anything they do not know? Early morning watering. The humans are expecting temperatures today as high as one hundred seven degrees. The plants, though, show no sign of concern. Which should we believe? […]
From a note written April 15, 2009: The other evening, while eating leftovers, I told my son that we should get rid of his cat and have a pet tarantula instead. I said we could keep it in a terrarium, and in the terrarium we could create a desert scene with dry sand and a narrow highway running through it — in honor of Bob Dylan, Highway 61. Somewhere along […]
This bright frosty morning, the world smells like a million lonely breakfasts. “November Postcard” Recently Banned Literature, November 16, 2008 Not a Romance, 1974 When I was hanging around at the college, there was a girl with very long hair and pale white skin. We met in passing many times, but we never spoke. She was beautiful in a simple way, like clean sheets drying on a clothesline beside […]
They approached him as if his mind were a cactus, when it was really a colorful old bus on its way through the desert. “A Sad Mistake” Songs and Letters, January 7, 2008 Night I picture a man with a typewriter in his lap, sitting on an old wooden chair beside a rusted mailbox, a field of wildflowers behind him. There is paper in the typewriter. Looking down from […]
William Michaelian 