If our yard weren’t overwhelmed by the neighbor’s fir trees, and used as a playground for squirrels, raccoons, skunks, opossums, and owls, I wouldn’t mind at all having goats and chickens again. But this is not to be. We do have ants, though, which invade the house each winter; we have flickers and crows, juncos, sparrows, scrub-jays, finches, towhees, robins, wrens, and red-tailed hawks; and only a few days ago, […]
I still rise around four in the morning, and I still enjoy a sip before dawn. And the time itself is one of stillness, and solitude. It’s not a big cup, but the coffee is black and strong, the way I knew I’d love it even in my childhood, long before I’d tasted of the miraculous bean. The cedar is now large enough to walk under, instead of having to […]
He had a perfect way of saying the desert had been crossed: Where water needs the flowers, we’re no longer lost. And there we laid him; and here grows the moss. “Where Water Needs the Flowers” Recently Banned Literature, April 11, 2014 . Copper In Your Palm Air so heavy with pollen and perfume, you wear it home. Comb it into the bathroom sink. Some settles on the lacy fern. […]
Back to Goose Lake, this time beneath a rapidly developing snow sky, with an early morning view of the Cascades: Mt. Hood and Mt. Jefferson are sharply defined and the entire range is aglow. Thirty-four degrees. Hawks, flickers, towhees, and talkative wrens; an eruption of ducks; near the old cottonwood, a picnic table that has absorbed so much moisture it looks like it will soon be growing again. Goose Lake […]
It’s rare anymore that I use the word my — my writing, my poems, my books, my furniture, my house, my friends, my wife, my love, my life, my time. Only when it’s necessary for the sake of clarity and meaning, or to properly assume responsibility, does the word seem justified — as in, This is my perception, or, This is my experience, or, This is my mess. Otherwise, the […]
Rain, enough to thrill the garden, but not to silence the scent of the grass seed fields. The delicate maples, red and green. The same towhee, in the same tree, sure each sentence must end differently. Flicker with an earth-brown beak, probing, searching, finding, swallowing. Little boy with a wet new bike, testing its frame against the curb, feeling the vibration in his bones. Funny how some words end up […]
The towhees nesting under the big rhododendron, in the shade of the birches and firs, have added two fine young offspring to the world. We saw them for the first time late yesterday evening, hopping along the edge of the ivy in what might have been their first foraging lesson. Drab-fluffy and rough-feathery, they were almost as big as their parents. Our human social fabric has so many rips and […]
Late each evening, the male towhee comes out from the rhododendron for one last look at the world and a little something to eat before bed. He is done singing for the day, and still mindful of the nest. Under the lilac, he finds something that intrigues him in the moss, and starts scratching like a chicken. The motion propels him forward several inches, then he hops back and pecks […]
Irises and Dreams The tomato plants are growing like weeds in the rain. This morning I walked in a dense, heavy mist. The robins were out. Some starlings. A towhee. Silence emanated from coy-hidden crows. Crow silence. Black-ink silence. The atmosphere, it seemed, was deep into the process of paper-making. A calligrapher’s dream. A mark here, a mark there, and thus a new language is born, and is off […]
I would gladly wear the colors of the male towhee that sings and dwells with his lovely mate in the birch-and-ivy environs of our fir-sheltered backyard. And it may well be that in another life, I already have, or will, and that this other life has a beautiful name of its own — Now. April 28, 2020 [ 732 ]
William Michaelian 