This morning I finished Edward O. Wilson’s Naturalist. After lunch I read in Emerson’s journal about the death of his little boy, Waldo. Two months ago, I ordered Library of America’s forthcoming two-volume edition, Molière: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations. Today I removed the plants from the pots, barrels, and planters behind the house. I also cleared the gutters, which were full to the brim with birch leaves and fir […]
A short dream: Without questioning its odd location, I realize that the bookshelf outside on our front step would be more useful inside. There are only a few books on it, while in the house there are enough scattered and stacked about to fill it and more. What strikes me most, though, is the near absence of dust. Why is there so much more dust on the other shelves inside, […]
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, […]
Having fortunately lived long enough to finish reading all three volumes of Vincent’s letters, I have moved on to Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, in Boris Brasol’s English translation, published in two volumes by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1949. After years of being away from Dostoevsky’s great novels and stories, coming upon him in the somewhat more casual, conversational mode of his periodical writings is much like having coffee with […]
How quickly my life is passing — as if each day it finds new means of escape, and is even now leaking out through my hair ends and fingertips — a joyful tingling sensation, light beyond light, darkness of a depth unimaginable — new birth, a second coming of age, my honeyed childhood on fresh warm bread just as the sun goes down — voices; wings; a strange starry canvas; […]
The grapes are ready, two bunches pick’d, and none denied the robin. The hand’s unsteady, the spirit’s quick, the moment’s soon forgotten. August 19, 2019 The Old Language The old man stood near the edge of the road, waiting for his grandson to get home from school. Seeing the bright-yellow bus come in his direction always made his heart glad. Soon the bus would stop in front of the […]
Perpetrator, subject, and witness all in one.
Impulse, mood, and countless other things I’ll never know:
The image arrives much as a poem — which is to say,
It was, and remains, beyond my control.
Alone
Self-Portrait, August 15, 2011
The Old Language: A New Revised Edition in Armenian,
translated by Samvel Mkrtchyan,
S & H Project, 2013
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The poems offered here are from my book of sixty-four short poems, Another Song I Know, published by Cosmopsis Books in 2007. The translations and transliterations are the generous, fine work of poet and friend, Vassilis Zambaras, author of numerous poems, as well as Sentences, Aural, Triptych, and other collections. Vassilis and I met online in the blog world in 2008. Within days, I felt we’d known each other for years […]
Story #1, Among the Living and Other Stories, 2000 Appeared previously in Armenian translation in Grakan Tert, a periodical newspaper publication of the Writers Union of Armenia. One thing that bugs me is that at the end of the day, they go home and I stay here. I’m not saying it should be the other way around. I know I’m not ready to leave. In fact, the thought scares […]
Around twenty years ago, I wrote some short stories, which, from this grizzled, objective distance, I can safely admire for their humor, truth, poetry, and vigor. Eight are included in my 2000 chapbook collection, Among the Living and Other Stories, which was succinctly described by its publisher as, “Eight crooked short stories of serious alienation.” There’s a tremendous amount of wordplay in that little book of awkward, unhappy, or otherwise […]
William Michaelian 