Paul Christensen: Earth Household
As the world rages to our east, and the fires flare up in Arizona, we have the first signs of spring – dark green spikes, crumbly surfaces around certain roots, … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: The Hinge of Summer’s Door
The vernal equinox came and went, like a cat creeping over the newly sprouted heads of anonymous weeds. You hardly knew, unless you were listening to NPR, that such an … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: Portrait of the Artist | James Dickey
He liked one phrase especially, “every word is a sunken Atlantis.” It said a lot about the way poetry functioned –every word in lyric was attached to a root mass of meanings, associations, feelings.
Paul Christensen: The Snow It Snoweth Every Day
I’m not complaining too loudly. The Ukrainians are out there on the hills waiting to get into Poland, and the snow is pelting their thin coats and caps and making the kids squirm up against their moms.
Paul Christensen: The Rhymes of Nature
Old snow. It’s like the linens piled up in a corner of a thrift shop, the kind passed down from grandmother to mother and then to a daughter who regarded … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: While Boston Sleeps
The day proceeded to turn over heavily, with the sun appearing to be bolted to a chink of sky between morose gray clouds. Poor Boston, poor humble Providence, all those rivets of history to our genesis as a nation graying in the ancient countryside.
Paul Christensen: In the Icy Womb of Winter
My wife noted this morning that the temperature gauge outside our kitchen widow read minus 9 degrees. The windows in the bedroom were frosted over with a thick rime, so … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: A Christmas at Home
She didn’t know why, but she said she was very happy, as happy as she had ever been. She was like a voice in the midst of war, a calming, soothing voice from home. He heard the words, he was moved to tears at their affection. He had survived.
Paul Christensen: Stormy Seas
Well, let’s see what we are confronting these days. Inflation is affecting half of America’s families. The Supreme Court is about to end Roe v. Wade for good and … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: The Leaden Hat of Fall
Once in a while the tufted sky would break open into dazzling radiance. I would often look up from my reading to behold a waterfall of fiery light, as if the Golden Fleece were hanging in a waterfall shedding all its precious minerals into the valley below.
Paul Christensen: Apocalypse Soon
We are outnumbered by countless other creatures, dwarfed by the complex imperial government of birds, by the subterranean empires of worms and grubs albino larva, moles, gophers, beetles with vast pincer jaws, by nomadic tribes of aphids and cutworms, by thread-like parasites that feast on my annabels in mid-summer, and of course, by the king of blood bandits, the Aedes aegypti mosquito that spawns in our lowland catchments and marshland.
Paul Christensen: What Isolation Teaches Us
The magpies have all packed up and left with the last straggling tourists. I don’t hear their falsetto cries anymore, and I miss them. I love to see two such … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: A Cup of Light
Soon enough the stars will appear like little nicks of light gouged into the darkness. Voices emerge from the ambiguity of evening as the kids return from school, grumpy and starving, and reach for a cup of hot chocolate and the first sugary taste of cake in their eager mouths.
Paul Christensen: Where Summer Ends
My village lies there in all its stony composure under the first thunderstorm of fall. It meant cold weather was coming, creeping in like a procession of ghosts under the rumbling sky.
Vox Populi 