Michael Thériault
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mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
Michael Thériault
@mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
250 followers 700 following 580 posts
I’ve done a few things. I’m not quite done yet.
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mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
And over on French Wikipedia, the delicious controversy, one that seems a luxury here, is whether Cinderella’s slippers were of glass or of squirrel fur:
philippegargov.bsky.social Philippe Gargov @philippegargov.bsky.social · 4d
Nouveau titre de page Wikipedia préféré pour aujourd’hui :
November 23, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Reposted by Michael Thériault
andrewbertaina.bsky.social
Morning poetry

Seamus Heaney
November 23, 2025 at 2:13 PM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
Tonight’s head of radicchio from my San Francisco fall garden.
A head of radicchio, looser leaves in brilliant purple veined in white falling away from a tight core.
November 21, 2025 at 11:25 PM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
Cost me more than an hour of sleep, but I rescued my wife from a mosquito last night. I am merciless in fulfilling this marital obligation. San Francisco fortunately doesn’t impose it often.
November 21, 2025 at 6:45 PM
Reposted by Michael Thériault
dorsalstream.bsky.social
I’d love to attach this Diane Seuss poem to ChatGPT like a block of C4, light its fuse, and walk away in slow motion.
Sometimes I can't feel it, what some call beauty. I can see it, I swear, the conifers and fat bees, ferns like church fans and then the sea, its flatness as if pressed by stones like witches were, the dark sand ridged by tides, strewn with body parts, claws, the stranded mesoglea of the moon jellyfish, transparent blob, brainless, enlightened in its clarity. I stand there, I walk the shore at low tide, the sky fearless, not open to me, just open, there it is, the wind, cold, surf's boom drowning out thought, I can photograph it, I can name it beautiful, but feel it, I don't know that I am feeling it, when I drown in it, maybe then.
November 21, 2025 at 1:23 PM
Reposted by Michael Thériault
anniejowrites.bsky.social
sorry to report that if you want to get up early to write for an hour & exercise outside, you have to get out of bed when the alarm goes off in the morning
November 19, 2025 at 6:48 AM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
Over at @flaminghydra.com, a first verse of fado?:
November 18, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Reposted by Michael Thériault
toddedillard.bsky.social
NEW POEM ALERT! got a couple new ones in the latest issue of @lamplitmag.bsky.social. Here's the lamp-iest one :)
The Lampshade At the gates of heaven they said let's review: six snails eaten, but no burning buildings entered to save a child, a puppy, a mother's music box. You splashed into a dozen rivers, but many more you saw and never touched, never thought to touch. And yet, you spent most of your life working on this one species of looking. You'd see a wooden door and make a face from its knots and whorls. You'd find a dead cardinal and would wonder if the dead forget the color red first. Mostly we were impressed with this hat you made one night out of a lampshade. Your toddler laughed so hard he nearly lost his voice. After finishing his bedtime, you turned to go, and he told you to stay. We liked how he pulled an imaginary string dangling out of your nose. How you shut your eyes afterwards and lay perfectly motionless beside him. For years your son believed light is something you become. It's waiting, there, under your skin.
November 14, 2025 at 12:48 PM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
Papalito says, Never cross a picket line, even for a walnut.
Blue and gold macaw
November 13, 2025 at 10:03 PM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
@twinbirdreview.bsky.social has taken my story “I and the I-not-I” for Dec2025 publication. The story, in which a roving lineman who can no longer rove discovers an alternative self who might — and so make a needed connection — justifies the bizarre title. My thanks to Editor-in-Chief Amanda K Horn.
Rise of a wooden power pole through planes of power and communication lines and associated devices, against mottled gray overcast.
November 13, 2025 at 4:20 AM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
Chuck, this is maybe not a good moment.
Envelope From The Desk Of Charles E. Schumer, adressed PLEASE OPEN IMMEDIATELY to Michael Theriault, San Francisco, CA
November 13, 2025 at 2:47 AM
Reposted by Michael Thériault
amorak.bsky.social
“I must break the language to tell it myself…” Donna Vorreyer
The book of poems Unrivered, by Donna Vorrreyer. Sundress Publications, 2025 Skeleton Key My ribs pick-up sticks, my skull a bowl for cherry pits and pyrite, a cauldron to simmer the marrow into song. The teeth from my jawbone strung like pearls with a clasp of hammer and anvil, adorning my laddered neck. Beneath the leaded apron, with each thunk of exposure, hymns are humming. After, the machine shows me arranged in the usual way, and the doctor reads the film. Minor lapses in density. Arthritic calcifications. Small fissures and lesions. But he doesn't know the real story. I must break the language to tell it myself: Once upon a time there was a girl whose skin was jeweled, whose sentences were filled with bones and ghosts.
November 9, 2025 at 3:48 PM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
I had bone scans today, which I get annually for a thing, and before the technician moved on to the next patient I had a glimpse of the screen. I am not a handsome skeleton.
November 8, 2025 at 4:31 AM
Reposted by Michael Thériault
wolfbridge.bsky.social
If you want to live in a nice world you have to support independent media and independent journalists that are doing the work and saying what needs to be said.

@404media.co @defector.com @marisakabas.bsky.social @theflytrapmedia.com @flaminghydra.com @aftermath.site

Probably missing quite a few!
November 6, 2025 at 4:03 PM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
OK, Gavin, I did my part.
San Francisco Elections sticker with pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, a sailboat, Sutro Tower, two of the local red-masked parakeets, a sea lion, California poppies, what I suppose are red dahlias, and “I VOTED” in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Tagalog
November 4, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Reposted by Michael Thériault
wikipediafr.bsky.social
30 octobre 1871 : Naissance de l’écrivain, poète et philosophe français Paul Valéry.
Figure majeure de la littérature française, il devient immensément célèbre à la suite de la parution de son œuvre poétique « La Jeune Parque » en 1917. #CeJourLà
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Va...
Photo rapprochée en noir et blanc Paul Valéry, reconnaissable à sa moustache, portant un costume et une cravate.
October 30, 2025 at 7:45 AM
Reposted by Michael Thériault
gonelawn.bsky.social
Hate this sort of thing.

Dark times keep getting darker. If you like Gone Lawn and you have the means, consider a donation to keep us going, even something small. Thank you.

gonelawn.net/journal/glj_...
Gone Lawn : About
gonelawn.net
October 29, 2025 at 3:04 AM
Reposted by Michael Thériault
drcanonic.bsky.social
I'm grateful to the govt officials who quietly keep our food safe & air clean & taxes collected, but whenever I teach the St. Matthew Passion I realize that of all the govt officials in all the world I'm most grateful to Picander—18th-c postal employee, later Liquor Tax Collector & Wine Inspector
manuscript title page of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, in Latin that translates roughly as "Passion of Our Lord J[esus] C[hrist] according to the Evangelist Matthew. Poetry by Mr. Henrici, aka Picander, Music by J. S. Bach"
October 27, 2025 at 9:21 PM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
No surprise, but an oncologist - nervous to be named - told this Stage4 survivor (so far) this a.m. that among the things quickly canceled by the Trump admin, long before the shutdown, were several steering committees on cancer research.

So that research won’t happen for the foreseeable future.
October 27, 2025 at 5:02 PM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
These nights a great horned owl is again in our pine. I’m praying to it to eat the rat that is eating the tomatoes that linger and ripen on my vines in a mild San Francisco October.

This owl precedes its hoots with appoggiature.
October 23, 2025 at 3:06 AM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
My wife and I bicycled San Francisco-San Diego in 2019 and the only way to bike through Camp Pendleton is on the shoulder of I-5.

Over which the Trump admin just sent artillery fire.

From which one premature shell burst dropped shrapnel on a CHP cruiser.

Imagining shrapnel on our ride.
October 20, 2025 at 3:25 PM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
Rimbaud’s birthday.

I continue to be very very fond of this performance/recitation of Le Bateau ivre:

youtu.be/7KXgKCL8XkM?...

Give Sara Llorca the full screen. She’s worth it.
October 20, 2025 at 3:07 PM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
The San Francisco high rise upper/center frame clad in red Swedish granite was my first as an Ironworker apprentice forty-plus years ago, ten stories in the air my first day. I tried for a photo of it today and found myself in this crowd.

In body and spirit.

No kings, ever.
A crowd with flags and anti-Trump signs faces down San Francisco’s Market Street among high rises.
October 19, 2025 at 12:09 AM
Reposted by Michael Thériault
californialabor.bsky.social
All of California Labor stands with David Huerta and we reject the unjust charges against him. Brother Huerta was peacefully protesting enforcement raids targeting working people when he was pushed to the ground and arrested. Standing up for workers is not a crime!
October 18, 2025 at 12:00 AM
mtheriaultsf.bsky.social
This in today’s San Francisco Chronicle while Marc Benioff and Elon Musk tell Trump Yes, please deploy the National Guard here, it’s so lawless. I’m 2 months shy of 70, which means the City is the safest it’s been all my long life here. The lies have abandoned any pretense of plausibility.
Under “Chronicle” the headline Homicide rate in S.F. lowest in 70 years, the subhead Projected stats belie Trump’s call to deploy Guard troops to the city, and the byline By Danielle Echeverría Staff Writer
October 15, 2025 at 8:12 PM