I had just finished vacuuming the kitchen floor and was about to turn off the machine when I saw an enormous spider walking my way. I pressed the off button. The spider was beautiful, brown and hairy like a small tarantula, but of a much less stocky build. And even if it was not beautiful to my dull standards, I had no desire to end its life, especially in such […]
Little by little, the ocean is breathing life into the valley. The air is still dangerous to breathe, but now it contains far more moisture, which is helping to slow the spread of the fires. Yesterday afternoon, there was a lot more bird and squirrel activity — the birds bathing, splashing, and scratching for seeds and worms, the squirrels with nuts in their mouths, scurrying along the fence tops. Humans […]
We’re told this morning that more than 900,000 acres of Oregon’s forests have been burned or are in the process of burning. We’re also told that ten percent of the state’s population has been evacuated to safer areas. The valley we live in is dense with smoke. The air quality readings are well into and beyond what is deemed hazardous. Yesterday evening our youngest son brought us two air purifiers […]
Another Library of America book purchase: William Wells Brown: Clotel and Other Writings. Violence at Oregon’s state capitol — flags, baseball bats, guns. Only humans are intelligent enough to express themselves in this manner. High winds from the east. Smoke and ash. Fires raging in the Cascades. Widespread evacuations. Windows closed against the elements. Early morning. Here in the dark, one thinks of the birds. The cricket in the rhododendron […]
At the table — linen napkins, fine crystal — flesh to recall cave times. Dancing lambs in a sunny field — mothers cry to daffodils. Home from the war — in a coffin — in the night — whippoorwills. Give Us This Day The house on the hill has a song behind its door each morning someone lets it out out of kindness the song flaps up to the […]
We always think it’s someone else. But it isn’t.
O hate! O love! O death! O war!
January 8, 2020
Canvas 1,128 — January 8, 2018
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If my age is equivalent to the number of times the earth has traveled around the sun since I was born, how old would I be if I lived on another planet, or in another galaxy, or in another universe altogether? And isn’t this what I already do? The degree to which I resist things as they are — that might be a more accurate rendering of my age. The […]
When one lives a simple life, is there a need to impose order? Doesn’t disorder arise from wanting what isn’t needed, and by following what’s traditionally accepted as the right way of doing things — doing what we are expected to do, buying what we are expected to buy, believing what we are expected to believe — without examining their wide-ranging, murderous implications? Observe an angry, disordered household, and see […]
This old battlefield is more than a place.
It is a face. It is grace.
Canvas 1,237 — July 13, 2019
No One Asks the Soldiers
When they’re dead,
they all look so familiar.
Songs and Letters, March 20, 2008
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bumblebee across your path child laughing in the bath so ends the war just like that “Just Like That” Recently Banned Literature, April 30, 2016 The Fifth of July And here are the solemn graves of all the braves afraid of love and peace. [ 441 ]
William Michaelian 