We broke the ice in the birdbaths and filled them with fresh water. The first drink was taken by a squirrel. Then a pair of juncos descended from the bare birches. They hopped around the rim, stopping for very quick small sips — stopping without stopping, you might say. More sun, more cold, not a drop of rain. The dry air inside makes the sinuses ache. My blood pressure was […]
Sometimes writing is like holding fabric in my hands and looking at it from its woven underside. Sometimes it’s like watching a preening robin after it’s had a sunshine bath. Always, it’s the eternal child’s way of saying remember me — and an old god’s kind and absent-minded smile. ~ [ 2048 ]
The bathrooms are clean, the floors are clean, and we are clean. And since the weather is dry and sunny, after our afternoon walk I’ll be able to resume work on the fig tree. I have nothing else to do in any formal sense, nothing “important.” And anyway, I’m convinced that tending to ordinary, everyday details, and really paying attention to them, is the best thing I have to offer […]
On the last day of the year, in a used bookstore we visit every so often in West Salem, I chanced upon an unread copy of a Library of America edition containing three works by Herman Melville, all having to do with the sea: Typee; Omoo; and Mardi. Priced at only eight dollars and fifty cents, the book was still in its original white slipcase, and its ribbon marker had […]
I could, of course, resume my habit of daily writing. All it takes is a simple decision. Yet I don’t recall having decided not to write every day. Rather, I fell out of the habit, as one falls out of the habit of any form of daily exercise, such as walking, running, stretching, lifting weights, and so on. Writing, looked at one way, is also a form of exercise, and […]
For a great many years, I thought I’d never fall out of the habit of daily writing. But here I am, days, weeks, and sometimes months between pieces, with just as few handwritten notes in between. Other than what I’ve already published, one would think I’m not a writer at all, at least by any outward sign, other than the use of playful, colorful language to address the odd experience […]
Easy, comfortable, perhaps even comforting — there’s nothing provocative or challenging here, no trauma or turmoil, only the familiar voice of someone remembering, imagining, reliving episodes from his childhood and beyond. Writing for writing’s sake. Writing to find out what might surface that day, as one day follows another, and the nights with their twitches and dreams, while a vast amount remains out of reach — or seems to, because […]
This morning, half an hour before sunrise, I heard two mourning doves: one across the street, calling from the neighbor’s fir tree; the other on the street south of ours, from the dense pine in front of a house sold a year or two ago by the elderly couple who used to live there. Early morning. Birds. Trees. And so the note I wrote August 1, 2018, already has that […]
I have to laugh: the preface sounds almost as if it means something. Ghostly storytellers and night-blue mirrors aside, it begins with a question which, for me, aptly defines the dream experience, and that of sleep and wakefulness as well. Which is which, though, remains agreeably subject to question. Of course this is familiar ground; I speak of it often; I might even say that most, if not all, of […]
Do not listen to the ministers of failure, who promise redemption for their imagined sins. Did Walt Whitman really write these words? In a sense, yes, because, whether those of us engaged in literary pursuits are aware of it or not, his influence is so great and so profound that it’s inevitable, at one time or another, we take up the pen in his name. Not only Whitman, of course; […]
William Michaelian 