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.
Paul Christensen: Messages from the Invisible
I am an outsider and always will be no matter how long I come and spend my summers here. I don’t mind; I like my existence framed this way, with enough sunlight to comfort my skin and aging body, and my ears thirsting to hear French laughter, and French whispers below my window.
Paul Christensen: A Velvet Gloom Before It Rains
The rain isolates you the way not even silence can.
Paul Christensen: The Changing Air of Nights
Night is a palace of memories, with the beams lashed to the roof and corded with fragments of childhood, vanished links of how we grew up, and faint traces of our mother caressing our hair and sending us up to bed after a rambling story about ghosts and goblins.
Rachel Hadas: Lessons of Poetry
It is easier to lecture about the time and place of a book, the culture that produced it, the special historical or linguistic problems involved in it. It is harder…to face the book as a masterpiece and to help the student understand why it is a masterpiece….
Paul Christensen: Back in France
When we pushed open the door to our village house, an old familiar odor of sun-warmed plaster rose up to us as if to give us an embrace.
Paul Christensen: The Pandemic Blues
Everyone around here is sluggish. The young woman who checks my purchases off the conveyor belt dabs her eyes and stifles a yawn. She keeps shaking herself awake as the … Continue reading
Paul Christensen: My Mazda and I
The monks of Europe often planted their vines in cemeteries to ward off thieves, and believed you could taste the blood of ghosts when you drank. My mother would sip her wine and look away dreamily and then back at me as if I had come home from a long journey, with the Mazda parked in her driveway.
Paul Christensen: Summer’s First Visitors
It’s summer and the gods are playing tug of war with the wind and the sun. Some days are dead-weighted with humid air that clings to our our faces like … Continue reading
