As I look over them now, I think most of the old Notebook entries from my first website, I’m Telling You All I Know, are better off left unread. But a few, like “Ghost and Cathedral,” and the piece I added earlier this year in August, are worth preserving. Already more than nine years old, I might have written it yesterday, so accurate it remains, and so dear the memory. […]
I’ve often wondered where drawn lines end and poems begin. Some will say poems must be made of words. Strictly speaking, that’s true. But I’ve lived long enough to know, I’m made of words too. And when you read between the lines, I read you. Of the photographic self-portraits I attempted several years ago, Roads, I think, is one interesting example. The image first appeared in Recently Banned Literature in 2011 and […]
I’m sixty-two. As I age, the desire to work grows ever stronger — the urge, the need, the understanding that it’s as much a matter of health as it is accomplishment — health physical and mental, a kind of spirit-health, which comes of living as lightly as possible on this earth and in this body, this body compromised and informed by years of stress and foolishness, clouded by ego and […]
The arrival of fall has me thinking about our closets again. The urge to dismantle the stacks of crated material, and to throw most of it away, has returned. Some of it, though, I have to keep: the old music books and sheet music from my piano-lesson days, for instance, and drawings our kids made. But the refuse of my writing life is another matter — the old redundant notebooks […]
Reading this poem now, more than thirteen years after it was written, it seems to reveal as much about the process of writing as it does about the little city that has been my home since 1987. I include it here for both reasons. I also include it because I’m a sentimental old fool who loves his poetic children for all they have taught him, and who is exceedingly grateful […]
Written very early in the dark on a Wednesday morning, the following lines seem more suitable for a Sunday — with the quiet half-understanding, of course, that there is really, and has only ever been, one day, and that that day has no need of a name. What happens is this: I hitch a ride, and for a while it carries me down the road. I smile when the driver […]
Imagine a hard-working composer paging through his music,
relieved and thinking he is done, coming upon this in his score.
“Dear Lord. What am I writing for?”
“The high notes and low notes, of course.”
“And which, pray tell, are you?”
“We? We are the many. We are the few. We are you.”
Music Lesson
2010
#2 Pencil on 4 x 6 Index Card
Music Lesson
[ 119 ]
The ancient texts of solemn trees. Bird tracks at my feet. Late-night lights in the widow’s house. Lichens on headstones. Thrice-woven wool. Galaxies that resemble scattered straw. Notebooks filled. A wealth of steam. The luck of rice. dew in the dust on the old man’s mailbox he reads his letters twice [ 104 ]
Almost all of my writing is done very early in the morning. “Saving Grace” is no exception. And yet I remember, or think I remember, that upon its completion, I felt an entire day had passed, and that the day was a lifetime. Such is memory. Such is rain. Such is writing. Sometimes you must leave almost everything out, to keep anything in. Saving Grace Today it’s the rain, […]
Some mornings, before it’s light, I think of the first hen down from her roost, standing silently like a ghost in the yard, unseeing, waiting, unsure, solemn, surprised, and a little confused. It’s almost as if she and I have both been pressed into service by an unseen hand, one if not wise, then bemused. So what’s left but to join her? Or maybe we should consider an exchange: she, […]
William Michaelian 
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