I Love Artists. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

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I Love Artists - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge New California Poetry

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opening, with an environment inside that is plastic and infinite,

      but is a style that has got the future wrong.

       Recitative

      Her voice on the telephone, while she is out of town performing the activities she is describing,

      but with a poignant elevation of mood, is quantifiably precise, insistently formal,

      as stripped down as a Palladian animation of form. Her beauty is identified with order,

      liveliness, serenity, a courtly arrangement of platforms or painted stars.

      Half their conversation is in shadow, so they speak in and out of a diagonal wedge of light.

      The possibility of static or a gap on a starry electric night gives the impression of her body

      constantly engaged in transition, but she desires to enter a body of material by talking.

      In Sumer and in Egypt in the 3rd millennium B.c., speech was spoken like an arrangement of stars,

      an orderly procession of luminous beings, who counted poetry with sound,

      until speaking gave way to a duration that would not reconstitute, so she may appear

      as a large masklike close-up and as an immobile figure in white on the bed,

      who actually absorbs space.

      One can paint stars on a black lead background,

      equivocal stars casting carpets of desire here and there in the middle of an errand,

      which up to then had proceeded in the state of non-imploring urgency of a body in diagonal,

      an image of outreach or hailing. For me, it seemed love was a spiritual exercise in physical form,

      and the diagonal was glints off an inferred line of sun lingering, as spring

      synchronized with the double space of her desire and her desire for their presence

      to be hieratic, not wholly expressive, a standard of grace in the corridor of a day,

      with narcissus. If it is through counting that speech is connected to time,

      then crossing an inferred estuary of this conversation is a rest in music.

       Alakanak Break-Up

      1

      To find out the temperature, she tosses a cup of water into the air,

      because it will evaporate before it hits the ground.

      She goes outside and tosses a cup of alcohol into the air,

      and then she keeps looking into the air.

      When her attention is discontinuous, this no longer means that

      she is inattentive. In the same way, they can measure the plain, now,

      although plain and temperature are vacuums her heat sweeps

      across, even before she has turned.

      When she turns, the ice she had been standing on is changing into

      foam and is about to drift away. It rumbles as it is changing.

      She watches it recede, until it is a slit of light entering the brain,

      because the brain is protecting itself against the light.

      Here is the event horizon. You can focus on a cone-shaped rock

      in the bay. You can make it larger and closer than the ice

      surrounding it, because you have the power to coax the target.

      This breaks up your settlement in a stretch of infinity.

      Then you tie some string to a stick and toss it in front of you,

      as you are watching the rock. Then you keep drawing it back.

      Sometimes the stick disappears in front of you, until you draw

      it back. At these times the rock has become yourself,

      wearing soft bedclothes and with burned eyes.

      You balance three horizons. In the same way you press down

      on her shoulders and gently push the person into the ground,

      which is constantly changing in the current and on the tide.

      This is where they have concentrated you. All that time

      you had been noting the direction of snowdrifts and stalks bent

      in the south wind. Nevertheless, a storm can distract your attention.

      Your attention becomes the rasping noise of a stick drawn across

      the edge of a bowl at a party. It draws attention tenuously

      from your fingers, the way your body starts to hurry in the wind.

      This is where they have concentrated you, in order to be afraid

      or in order to re-create the line between your mind and your mind

      on the other side of a blue crack in the ice, so you can sit

      facing each other, like ice floes folded up and cut up

      and piled up against each other, and so you know enough to stop

      as soon as you lose your direction.

      Then, if you are on the ocean, with poor visibility, with no wind,

      and you cannot be seen, please go around the outside of an ice

      floe, because the ocean has dust particles, which will sparkle

      and indicate the direction of the sun, she says.

      When you look up, you see a heavy frost has formed on the window,

      which had been damp for a while each morning, and then would dry

      up and crackle. You pass the window. Ice begins to melt and drops

      of water travel down the window diagonally, because of your speed.

      You take the window and place it in your mouth, and meanwhile

      fish line attached to a red bandanna jiggles in the dark,

      because you are losing consciousness. It swarms around the rag

      when you look up at it against the sky.

      The dashes you had applied so carefully, in order to record rotation

      in

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