Paul Christensen: Ghosts and Memories
It’s the place where the dead are sleeping, barely breathing in the moist black earth along the creek. They will rise when the time comes, and ask the living for a candle, perhaps a dish with a cookie on it.
Paul Christensen: Nutshells
The inside of a nutshell is chambered like the heart, with little ridges and flanges where the nut grew and prepared itself for falling into the waiting earth. That’s what I smell when I hold up a nutshell to my nose. It is the odor of anticipation, the willingness to be sacrificed to the sharp teeth of an animal worrying the shell until it breaks.
Paul Christensen: Summer’s End
Summer is like old gold, dark with age. You feel its strength become mellow and pliable in the soft breezes. There is wisdom in the heat that still simmers along the edges of noon, as if it were trying to tell us that illness or aging are as natural as drawing breath.
Michael Simms: Dogsbody to the Muse
Sometimes it’s painful to watch a group of poets trying to work a room as if they were politicians. The AWP conference, as the wag put it, is comprised of 15,000 introverts pretending to be extroverts.
Paul Christensen: Second Sight
My mother was Italian, a passionate, sensuous woman who believed in fortune telling and heeding the voice of intuition, which was very strong inside her. She told me she had been born under a veil, meaning the amniotic sack at birth, and that this was the sign of her prophetic powers.
Paul Christensen: A Memory
I remember standing in a south wind staring at a cut bank of the Brazos River. The ground above was lush and green, with some beef cows nibbling on tufts … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: The American Dream
I never mastered the art of the hustle, and the bar, with its stench of stale beer and cigar smoke, intimidated me. I shined my father’s shoes for a dime, and scrubbed the polish off my hands with cleanser. Life is hard, and I was getting beat up by it.
Paul Christensen: The Waiting Game
I sometimes think of myself as Jody Tiflin, the boy from John Steinbeck’s story who longed to have his mare Nellie deliver a foal, the red pony, only to discover … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: The Vernal Equinox
I found three tiny crocus sprouts in the garden today. They were as innocent as a boy’s first pubic hair, tentative and shy, but determined to flow with time toward … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: January’s Two Faces
Nothing can make the soul shiver more than to look upon those tree-covered slopes with their icy diamonds shimmering on their skin. They are there to remind you that your mortality means nothing to them. They stand for the severity of time, the rules of the universe that have nothing to do with our petty lives.
Paul Christensen: The Dregs of October
I’m staring out of a large window onto a stone wall where an ancient grape vine hangs heavy with bunches of blue grapes. There’s no one to cut down these … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: After the Equinox
It’s fall here in southern France. The tourists have thinned out to a trickle of rubbernecks aiming their smart phones at almost anything green or shaggy with vines. They hardly … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: Wearing my corrective lenses
. Sometimes I find myself wandering out of a book into a rambling daydream, one that has neither a beginning nor an end, just a labyrinth of choices and minor … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: Feast Days
In Provence, we’ve just passed through August 15, one of the summer’s biggest festival days, the Assumption of Mary, the day in which Mary ascends into heaven escorted by a … Continue reading
