Emily Brisse

Such timing, this book entering my life, the landscape shifting and changing around me, just so. Come two more weeks into April, and I could not have abided a story with blizzards and below zero temperatures. Come one week earlier, and I would not have savored strong rivers and spring time like I do this day. Also: pardon the antiquated language. This is how eleven-year-old Reuben Land talks, steeped as he is in his dad's KJB. Also, I have this terrible habit of falling in love with first-person narrators just like him, first-person narrators who believe that round and starchy words have a place on the tongue. Peace Like a River . Minnesotan Leif Enger wrote a good one. The book came out in 2001 and promptly garnered a bevy of accolades and "best-seller" labels. It's easy to see why. This story is nothing if not eminently readable. Let me just list some prevalent themes: family, tragedy, faith, love, adventure. You see what I mean? There is not a lot that is rac...

The thick nouns of our winter cold are soon To disappear like shifting, soft vapor, Like morning fog that clings as close as loons To lake tops warmer than the April air. When up it lifts, the skies erupt in blue Announcing with the earth that spring has sprung. Warm breezes! Rain! Round, cotton clouds and dew! These greens! Such oxygen is gold for lungs. As Northerners, we rush outdoors to sing, To revel in the sun our skin has missed We happily observe the birds trav'ling, Bright promises enclosed in their twig fists.      And just as we put back mittens and hats,      We wake to white—more snow—yes, just like that. -- by moi Originally written for my students after a lively sonnet lesson. Originally published in The Saint Cloud Times  April 2008 Spring Poetry feature.

Memory 1: The view from my child's seat on the back of your bike as you pedaled us around Lake Ripley. It was dusk in mid-summer. Children were emerging from the lake reluctantly, water dripping from their hands and chins, sand coating their feet. We stopped to watch them. You turned back to recheck my buckles, to feed me small carrots, to swipe my hair behind my ears. "You doing okay?" I was. I remember the pink of the light. Memory 2: Lake Shetek this time. I am older, maybe five. You and I are floating on the water upon a wide yellow air mattress. There is a heavy brick below us with a rope wrapped around it that you've tied to your big toe: an anchor, so we don't float in or float off or get too close to the reeds. There are speed boats, the hollers of skiers, the roar of cousins playing pick-up baseball on the street. But most importantly--I can tell--there is us, our conversation about what will happen next to Laura. We have been reading Little House on t...

"Blizzard" After midnight the blizzard howls itself out, the wind sleeps, a tired lover. Before bed, I think of you and play the  Meistersinger  quintet over and over, singing along on all the parts, dancing though the house like a polar bear who thinks it has joined the ballet. You are in my arms, dancing too; whirling from room to room; frost crusted on the window begins to glow like lit up faces. My five fingers, now on fire like these five voices singing, imagine touching the skin over your shoulders -- By Bill Holm

Forgive me: I don't leave early enough in the morning. I am eager to get home to dinner at night. I don't stop. I don't slow the car, pull over, slip my feet into boots and traipse across iced savannahs. I have not captured these places with what we onced called film.  But there are several images that I've seen this last month, and loved: 1) Fence poles, stark and gray against an afternoon sky, slices of shadow splicing the snow. They are straight and crooked and lonely. Yet brave. They remind me of thin children in a school yard lined up to jump rope. 2) Sand dunes that are snow dunes, Antarctic ridges that are Saharan ridges. Hills that rise up, their wide bodies tinged with blue, into a blue-white sky. 3) Thick snow on the roads. At 6:07 a.m--the morning black except for headlights and all this otherwordly visiting white--I think, We tell ourselves we have settled this land, cut through it cleanly from one city to the next--but we are all visitors. We ar...