I was back from a run in time to see a raccoon family scamper across the street and disappear in the dark between the neighbor’s house and ours. I think I counted two adults and three young ones. . A delightful footnote on the first page of Ozell’s revision of Peter Motteux’s translation of Don Quixote, where we learn, “His diet consisted more of Beef than Mutton; and with minc’d […]
When I ran this morning, I wore gloves and a snow cap, yet my bare feet were warm. . I’m aware that I write for a very small audience. I’m also aware that each member of that audience brings something to the writing that it most certainly needs: kindness and wings. . Gutter Journal, Numb. 4. Thursday, November 9, 2023. Cleaned back gutters and downspouts of fir needles and birch […]
Met with no traffic during this morning’s run through the neighborhood. Back in the house before four-thirty. A starry sky, with a bright, waning, super-blue moon. Air clean and free of wildfire smoke. Spanish. Read a page of Juan Valera’s Pepita Jiménez. Italian. Read a passage from a translation of Homer’s Iliad. How much of effort is really the reaffirmation of one’s ego-identity? Axe, muscle, gravity. But when I chop […]
In the evening, the lilac scent. When dry, the cones on the pine were open and appeared ready to fall. A little rain, though, and they have changed their minds. Now their upper halves are closed — not tightly, as when they are green, but enough to demonstrate their connection to the tree. While standing near the lilac behind the house this morning, I was visited by a little wren, […]
I record dreams as truthfully and faithfully as I can. In terms of accuracy, how successful I am varies from one attempt to the next, fiction and memory overlapping as they do. The form also varies. Some are set down in straightforward prose; others as poems; not a few are drawings and are rendered without words at all. There are even times when I do not realize I am recording […]
Es él distinguida por la vida imaginaria —
o, “Sin molinos de viento, su mundo no es más que un sombrero divertido.”
(Con disculpas á Cervantes)
Canvas 913 — May 30, 2017
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Quite often, later in the day, I’m apt to think of something I’d like to write about the following morning. In some cases, the urge is strong enough that I’m tempted to begin right away. But I rarely do. First, I’d rather wait and see if the following morning does come. If it does, and I’m blessed with that bit of good fortune, I make coffee and read Spanish for […]
Sometimes, if it’s read slowly enough and with love, even a poem that’s deeply flawed, such as this one, seems not so flawed after all. And when we think of people as poems, and approach them in the same way, it’s positively medicinal. One Sunday in October Just enough rain to sprout mushrooms, then wave upon wave of mold. Un cuervo, mi mente, un matorral. How a boy in […]
Up at three-thirty this morning, after reading Spanish for half an hour, I turned to some of the dreams I recorded in 2008 and 2009. Several of them involved my mother and deceased father and my childhood home, and in several others there appeared old school friends, as well as a friend I had at the time who died in 2010. So many strange, familiar situations, filled with longing, color, […]
The potted petunia bloomed itself silly, then we cut it back, and now it’s covered with fresh green growth and a wealth of new flowers. Purple, púrpura, velvet, terciopelo. One thing I notice about older hikers who walk with a stick, is how the stick is as much a companion as it is a physical aid. For me, metal walking poles, as useful as they apparently are, have no appeal. […]
William Michaelian 