Paul Christensen: On Silence
I am possessed of a brooding spirit, some ominous angel who has landed on my shoulders, staring at my ear. It wants to know why I do not understand silence, the poetry of space.
Paul Christensen: The Reluctant Summer
I could feel the rage building as I saw the nation writhe, then uncoil its wrath and take to the streets. I was demoralized to realize that my whole life had been lived in the twisted emotions of a country poisoned to its soul with racist hatred.
Paul Christensen: The Book of Eternity
The dark has stairs and doors that have never been opened. Who knows where they lead, or what impenetrable paradoxes await the person who turns a knob and presses against the infinite ignorance we cower from?
Paul Christensen: Timbrels in the Marsh
The sky is a stoic blue, hard as a marble, with little wimpy clouds that carry nothing more than a few regrets from a dying winter. We’re here, right on the precipice of a season.
Paul Christensen: When the Ice Won’t Melt
It’s one of those diamond-bright days of early winter, with the ground ringing like iron when you walk on it.
Paul Christensen: Snow Bound
The snow and the dark wind, the impassable wastes of one’s backyard, the icy draft that leaks in under the front door tell you you have no place to go. You must sit down and allow the slightly old-fashioned language of self to drift in.
Sydney Lea: Passing the Arts and Crafts Fair
There aren’t many like him anymore, the handy, soft-spoken old ones, who still know how to farm, how to raise up a house you can live in, how to still-hunt a whitetail.
Robert Frost: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Paul Christensen: The Rain It Raineth Every Day
They say the average cloud weighs about the same as eighty elephants. A big storm such as now darkens the sky overhead must be an infinite parade of elephants milling around in the dark gray pastures above us.
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.
