The front door of my childhood home —
someone has left it standing open. Two cats, the small reclusive
calico that lives with us now and a soft-white stranger with brownish
face and paws, are inside playing. When they see me, they dash out. I
follow them and close the door. To the east beyond the yard, a
morning view of the High Sierra. I think of a painter in love with
blue, long since buried in the snow. I remember what a lover knows
and is so eager to begin — the taste of one bright apple, and
footprints where no one else has been.
Poems, notes, and drawings by William Michaelian
Blog and archive, 2008-2018, 3,990 entries
Main website: william-michaelian.com
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Darwin
While reading early this morning, a
small leaf fell from between Pages 222 and 223 of my old book into my
lap. It was very dry, but not brittle, without the slightest tear
anywhere in its delicate map of veins, or damage to the several dozen
points by which its edges were defined. After I’d finished those
pages, which were about Charles Darwin, I returned the leaf to its
place, not knowing who had put it there, or in what state of mind,
and having no idea as to its future. And then, before I continued on,
there came upon me a memory of graves I’ve seen of pioneers, their
names and dates a lichen stain or mossy smudge, as if the elements in
their persistent art had replaced one kind of writing with another.
To which I answer now with the miracle that is my hand.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Testament
In the eyes of the law, I own so very
little that my will, if it were written, could fit on the blank side
of a business card and still leave room for a drawing. In truth, I
own nothing, nothing at all. What “belongs” to me is only
temporarily in my care. Love, like a fledgling poised for freedom in
my hands, is all I have, and all I really have to give.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
You Are Here†
The geography of reason,
related in a dream:
You are here,
wherever here might be,
And what you seem
is what I mean.
† an impromptu response to Robert
Willson’s inspiring renewal theory
Monday, January 23, 2012
On French Pronunciation
Being unable to correctly read and
pronounce all but a few French words has bothered me only little
until now. Now I not only want to learn to read comfortably in
that language, I feel it’s an absolute necessity, and an
embarrassment that I’ve put it off for so long. Luckily, my copy of
Heath’s French and English Dictionary (1903) has a guide to
pronunciation. That will be a good place to begin, as well as Chapter
13 of George Moore’s Avowals†, which is a lecture of his presented in French. As I told
my son this morning in a brief email exchange, how can I skip that
chapter and still say I’ve read the book? Next and simultaneously
on my list: Latin.
† a book mentioned here
yesterday
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Rain
We could abandon buildings for streets
and fields,
look up, open our palms, and let our
minds be cleansed;
but that’s too simple, and so we wage
war instead.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Snowflakes
Think of them, for a moment,
as fingertips of all the world’s
dead,
seeking love in faces, hands,
and tongues.
Softly as their peace is borne,
we are among them.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
In the interim
While I chimed like a grandfather
clock, my grandson† watched the movement of my tongue as if it were
a pendulum. To his rapt attention, hour upon hour I tolled, until I
became a horse’s hooves on cobblestone, and the mist arose, and
Dickens was at the door. “I’m here!” the dear scribe cried, as if he’d
joined us many times before. And, as he eyed us with a pleasure I
clearly understood, the movers came and carted me away. “He was a
good old clock,” their foreman said, “back in his day. I wonder
what we’ll get for him?” The truck roared off. My grandson, a
grown man in the interim, looked after us and waved. Or so I imagined
in the cold and in the dark.
† our second, nine months old
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
I love you is a song
If those of us who remain in touch
through this medium have learned anything about the friendships that
we’ve forged, it’s that they’ve come about through an ongoing
exchange of gifts. Whether what we share is of our own making or is
the work of someone else, we share it because we find it meaningful
and moving in ways we hope will reveal what we’ve learned, how we
feel, and who we are. And the very fact that some of us do
remain in touch shows that we succeed.
The cumulative nature of our exchange
is powerful indeed. It coincides with our need to tell, and to be
told, stories the endings of which we understand might never be
known, or reached, or resolved. I love you is a song that
never grows old. Do you love me is a timeless hope that stirs
the soul.
As with our relationships that are
conducted face to face, or which began that way, or are steadily
moving in that direction, there is no better way to proceed. The
distance we travel, and the depths that are revealed, grow in direct
proportion to how freely our offerings are made. Our eagerness and
generosity give them value.
The other day, when my wife was out
walking with our four-year-old grandson, he stopped abruptly when he
noticed a withered plant nestled alongside the curb. Plucking from it
several dried seed pods, he told her, “These are for Grandpa.”
They were given me later, damp from his hand, and all the winters of
the world cannot be cold enough or long enough to keep his gift from
taking root between us.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
The Oaks
The oaks are thriving. The oaks are
dying.
The path is wide through rolling hills.
My father is beside me.
But he doesn’t care or know.
The oaks are sighing. The oaks are
crying.
Here. There. It’s impossible to tell.
Both. And all. Smoke. A bell.
Water at the sink. A glass for him.
The past for me. Present.
Perfect. Lying.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Wilderness
A soul-painting from a very old book?
Perhaps,
or a love that forgets her name; and
then a leaf falls —
a page, a line, an age of kind and
wordless ways,
soft as wind through sage, to sleep, to
dusk,
to fate — to heal the rock of your
face.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Preposterous and Untenable
A sublime, medicinal, addictive aspect
of doing almost nothing but reading for several days is how far away
from, and into, oneself one travels; but this awareness pales before
the sudden, seemingly accidental realization that, in the process,
what formerly was taken for “real life” is now preposterous and
even untenable, and must be appreciated and understood as fiction if
it is to be plausible and liveable at all.
Yes, I have been reading. And to a very
large degree, reading for me is much as it was when I was a boy
growing up in California’s San Joaquin Valley: a refuge wide as an
old shade tree, a sparkling glass of ice-cold lemonade, a log on the
fire when vineyards and orchards are ice-bound and shrouded in fog,
each savored and held simultaneously in the mind, all to a whisper
offered by the sweet, sensuous lips of an imagined,
more-real-than-real Beloved.
The very same, of course, can be said
for writing.
My computer is running again, new hard drive and all. On
the technical front, it has been an expensive, trying week, and it
will be a while yet before my system is in full and comfortable
working order. And the same goes for my computer.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Now you see him, now you don’t
As luck or fate would have it, I’ve been offline since the second day of January, due to some major computer problems. At the moment I’m across town at my son’s house, catching up on (but not really responding to) my email. I’m not sure yet when everything will be resolved. In the meantime, there are three books I’m reading: Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh; Volume 10 of Elbert Hubbard’s Little Journeys (Great Teachers); and Samvel Mkrtchyan’s Armenian translation of Ulysses. I’m also reading around in (and handling, and inhaling the intoxicating scent of) several others....
Sunday, January 1, 2012
With Screams and Blood
Quite often, what strikes me about a
piece soon after I’ve written and sent it into the world is how
very weak it seems, in terms of completeness and accuracy, compared
to life on the street. For instance, not long ago after finishing
what I felt was a fairly nice blog entry, I treated myself to part of
an afternoon in a used bookstore. Well before I arrived, not five
minutes from home, I was struck by the rich variety of attitudes,
mannerisms, postures, gaits, and facial expressions in those I passed
along the way. Immediately I recognized, for what must have been the
ten thousandth time, that my starry-eyed vision of the world has little if
any practical meaning† in the lives of most people, while
their own activities and affairs have everything to do with, and are
in many ways similar to, mine. Granted, our approaches in some cases
must be different. But considering the limits of human nature, how
different can they be? And, most important, can I honestly say that
mine are any more effective? Or are they only part of an ongoing
conversation with myself, a gee and haw designed to
keep me from going insane? Whichever, it’s clear to me that a great
deal of it is habit. I think the way I do, and wrestle with problems
the way I do, because my mind is trained along that course. In
following that course, I meet with familiar obstacles and
frustrations, which in turn reinforce what at best is a fleeting
identity. Steal my memory, pluck a loved one from my midst, and watch
me fall apart. All that I am, quickly becomes all that I was: an
anxious child looking for a way to say how I feel. When I was eight
years old, I stepped on a piece of cactus that had somehow made its
way from my mother’s flowerbed into our front lawn. What did I do
when the long needles penetrated my bare heel? How did I respond?
With screams and blood.
I feel I should be writing that way
now.
I handled a great many, and even
sniffed a few, but I bought no books that day.
The store was busier than usual,
considering it was after Christmas. Without trying, I eavesdropped on
several conversations.
The eighth volume of Grolier’s
sixteen-volume set of William Hazlitt’s Life of Napoleon was
missing. At eight dollars each, I couldn’t afford the other fifteen
books anyway, even though the edition was numbered and limited to
1,000. Wants and needs? As if anything were ever that black,
and that white. Damn fool.
There were two young women upstairs,
sitting near the railing. They were so beautifully subject to their
sexual imperative that the books on the table between them were
charged with fantasy and light. Their words reached my ears not as
meaning, but as song.
Further on, not far from where I found
the Hazlitt volumes, a young man was praising Project Gutenberg. One
of the girls he was with replied, “Yes, but it’s not the same as
holding the books in your hands.”
It’s not the same, in other words, as
holding life — as holding a newborn baby, a flower, or a
wet calf fresh from its sweet mama’s insides.
† I do not say practical application,
because I think it does. For better or worse, how we live as
individuals has a direct bearing on what goes on in our world.
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