PAUL CHRISTENSEN
OF MICE AND MEN
When you step outside my front door, your feet touch what feels like a mirror, an oiled mirror that was made for you to slip on, perhaps even crack a rib or fracture some part of your hip. I advance to this door and look down with a certain dread at the faint blue gleam of this ice floe. I'm sure a polar bear would want to skate on it and relish the possibility of finding a walrus in the next thawed pool of ice. But I'm not a polar bear. I'm a bit of a geezer, with my wool fe
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 nearly opaque I couldn't even see the road below. The earth was dense, dull-colored, contracted into a fist of frozen stoicism. Everywhere you looked, the ice had conquered us. The day before, as I lay in bed with my cup of coffee listening to the radio, my morning routine at 8 a.m., I heard some squawking in
WHERE ARE THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR?
The yard looks like a thrift store exploded and left behind all these threadbare white shirts, many of them stained and knotted up. But of course that is not laundry out there, but the scraps of old snow lingering long after the enchantment of a snowfall has died away. Lots of animal prints, and the detritus of trees shedding dead limb ends, branch trash, a few enduring leaves the wind has shaken loose. When Francois Villon, the medieval French poet, asked, where are the snow
