Paul Christensen: A Diary of Winter
The cold came in silent as an owl. The fences stared out at the clenched landscape with gaping eyes, unlocked gates, a path already flattened out in anticipation of the coming snow.
Paul Christensen: Interpreting YouTube
YouTube is full of mini-documentaries on how other animals express love for one another, and remember the kindness paid to them by human beings after years of living in the wild.
Paul Christensen: At Sea on the Queen Mary Two
In the decks above, life was throbbing and squirming in anticipation of some event that would never come. Or if it came, would be so gradual as to be uneventful. The sea told me that.
Paul Christensen: Sailing the Seas of Memory
Five days into our sea voyage and we are in a hazy, slightly coolish mid-day. It’s another day and a half before we slow down and head for Southampton, England. Can’t wait.
Paul Christensen: Chapped Lips
Silence is winter’s sonata, a moody, tuneless trill of wind and creaking branches, and the muffled voice of a crow trying to call out through the blur of snowfall.
Paul Christensen: Pomegranates in Winter
Snow reminds me of the chalky blackboards of my childhood, the ones I was required to wash with a fat sponge and a bucket of water. A nun would occasionally check up on me to see that my labors were done in earnest.
Paul Christensen: Not All Roads Lead To The Banks
The word for temple in Latin is fane, and the market that stands before it is profane. And that word has come down to us as meaning anything other than the sacred, the dark side of human maneuvering and sleight-of-hand.
Paul Christensen: The Future of an Illusion
He is already shriveling into an empty legend, a flimsy cartoon of ruthless malevolence.
Paul Christensen: The Life of the Accused
I admired his courage, his tenacity, the strange will power some kids possess before they grow old enough to know real danger.
Paul Christensen: The Ice Man Cometh
Vermont has gone into deep storage, buried under a foot of sticky snow, with drifts reaching up to a few feet in some places. The silence is as pure as a church on Saturday.
Paul Christensen: The Journey We All Must Take
When you’re a knee-scabbed, scruffy looking kid, a tree-climbing ruffian hanging from the neighbor’s crab apple tree and running away from some irate neighbor after soaping up his car windshield, on Halloween, you don’t know it but you are the unacknowledged expert of what it means to be living in your pre-pubescent body.
Paul Christensen: The Bennie Thompson Crusade
The closing remarks of Bennie Thompson were so pure in their simplicity and directness, I had to hold my breath.
Paul Christensen: The Cornhole Tournament
What happens when a large segment of a population finds itself displaced, bullied off the bench?
Paul Christensen: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Twit
I used to wander around on lower Broadway in Manhattan when I was still a teenager. I had a dead-end job at a valve company taking orders from plumbers wanting a gate valve or oversized coupling for an apartment building going up.
