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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520939103 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 04/10/2006 |
| Series: | New California Poetry , #18 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 154 |
| File size: | 178 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
I Love Artists
New and Selected Poems
By Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2006 Mei-mei BerssenbruggeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-93910-3
CHAPTER 1
Aegean
Tang tang tang tang tang tang tang
ting ting ting ting ting
I eat a goat
bite into the flesh
of the spirit on the island
brown-eyed spirit flies
into emptiness
like an empty goat skull
odor of sea shell.
Perpetual Motion
1
You go to the mountains
stretch in the light aquariums
and wait—
stillness turns in its well
2
I touch your face
of rosewood and sap
the last vanished yellow
of sunset on the mountain
the first cellular light of a flank
3
Walking up the mountain
before an avalanche
you'll find the sandstone
of the peak tattooed with waves
The summit moves with the tide.
Chronicle
My great-grandfather dozed after drinking
hot liquor in his dark room full of books
When she entered to wake him without knocking
as she did every night being the first grandchild
he was dead. One fur sleeve touched the floor
Once he carried her in his big sleeve through
cold halls to the kitchen where they were burning
straw. His daughter took her smelling of wormwood
behind the fireplace to feed. It wasn't the same robe
he died in, but the same color and cloth. My mother
really can't remember the smell of lynx, herbs
against moths, nor the slowness of his step
which must have been told.
The Reservoir
1
The reservoir is trying to freeze over
with an expanding map shaped like an angel
Separated lovers on a coast keep walking
toward each other. Low sun reddens
their faces without heat
They are weary of always moving
so seldom touching, but never think
to move inland, massive and stable
Imagoes hatched on thin ice, it's
their illusion membranes are brighter
than occluded flesh of interiors
Membranes have the density
of an edge, and edges violent as lava
2
All day she walked across the tundra
He began to drive away obliquely
at exactly her speed, so she altered
her angle, aiming above him, as in a current
He departed in a zone that solidified
at his whim, so she reached for his hand
Land cracked with their weight. He seemed
to reach toward her, a hand like paper
twisted and folded over, only a surface
with wan modulations, like a map
3
Then she delicately stepped out
toward the edge, tenuous as a leaf
as if waiting for a letter
but it froze too swiftly before her
At dusk his voice broke her concentration
She turned, vexed, and saw he had not spoken.
from The Field for Blue Corn
3
Certain colors are the conversation
we held one dusk, that altered
from the violent afterglow of fresh bones
to the gray corolla of old ones, only minerals
As restless matrices in blue sage dissolved
a horntoad ran under a bush. I insisted it was
a baby bird. Then a baby bird and a horntoad
ran out. Now, on a hill I never noticed
between two close ones we've climbed, I see
at an altered angle. Some small shift in refraction
has set the whole plain trembling and hostile
4
I wondered if seasons were invented
by our brain, which is maternal, to soothe
chaotic events, since no springs here
have been alike. Moths swarmed the elm tree
one year, and bees the next, so I thought
it was the teeming, but this year is dry
austere, an anatomical drawing of the heart
taken from life, inaccurate and scientific
Branches without leaves over bare ground
pretend to reveal everything. We revolved
around ourselves as if we were central, the way
the earth was, which is not, like this plain
sun lights between the Taos Mountains and Jemez
Now, move a little to the west. Seasons are
an amulet against the heartbreak of things not unique
dulling loss by flowerings, the columbine
that died back. A rite of passage is the first
winter, we need to survive meeting strangers
as pulsating light and not explosions, the way
a flower, as "the culmination of a plant"
expresses its seductive intent
6
Color is an aspect of the light on a face
and on the pale gash of a washout in the hills
like spans of window glass on winter sky
The hue of vapors is revealed through a filter
of clouds with soulful articulation. We see
blue shadows on peaks normally glittering
with snow. I learned the palette
of diffuse days. Positive tones, finely altered
are silence and distance. In curtained rooms
a pulse beats in prisms on the floor
Other days one goes out adorned and sunburnt
All the more precious a veined wing
Undiluted brightness is an aspect with heroic
edges, in spite of common immersion in sun
as from the lover's face, veiled or aggressive
along a large but rhythmic wave. As with
land, one gets a sense of the variations
though infinite, and learns to make references
7
Please stay a little longer, at least
until the garden is turned, our old whimsical
siege on arid land, where I have seen snow peas
and columbine, even though not inert growth
Extra effort to keep a flowering vine as it is
entropy, is locked into our memory, since
we'd naively assumed flowering was natural
A sprout against its seed coat is the first
battle, after the one with air. All the seeds
seem to fall near the enemy. If I have failed
to grow herbs in a knot, as in English gardens
some motley hardy ones may take, and buckle
the topsoil with incompatible roots. Please
stay. Help me pace out the field for blue corn
If a winter has seemed to pass as only our shadows
on a rough wall, weren't they blank and rough
as apple petals blown over and over each other
to drift in heaps on the porches?
The Constellation Quilt
She stitched her story on black
silk patches from the mourning dress, quaint
as our novels will seem, but we still recognize
tonight's sky, as if there were a pattern
whose edges compose with distance, like nebulae
or namings, so triangles become Orion
Horse, Morning Star, not flanks and wings imagined
in gases, or story pieced out of intervals
from which any might grow, as if sparks ever
scatter the same, or a name assume one face
and stance, dated in cross-stitch in a corner
Stitching a name like defoliate in white thread
on white fabric leaves the leaf empty. In that
century, it was a giraffe or a bear's act. Sometimes
the only pattern seems shock waves advancing
in parallel fanned lines, leaving a tide's debris
whose pattern is moon, cryptic as if there were none
the one safe assumption. Littlest sisters eclipsed
are each another story of a marriage, using the same
scraps for different constellations, Bear, Swan
overlapping.
The Heat Bird
1
A critic objects to their "misterian" qualities
I look it up and don't find it, which must relate
to the mystères in religions. Stepping
across stones in the river, which covers
my sound, I startle a big bird who must circle
the meadow to gain height. There is a din
of big wings. A crow loops over and over
me. I can see many feathers gone from its wing
by sky filling in, but it's not the big bird
I walk into the meadow to find what I've already called
an eagle to myself. At first you just notice a heap
like old asphalt and white stones dumped
2
There is a curving belly. The cow's head is away from me
Its corpse is too new to smell, but as an explanation
hasn't identified my bird. Twice I'm not sure if light wings
between some bushes are not light through crow feathers
but then I really see the expansive back swoop down
and circle up to another cottonwood and light
It's a buzzard with a little red head. You say
that's good. They're not so scarce anymore. It should
have been more afraid of me
3
Fresh wind blows the other way at dawn, so
I'm free to wonder at the kind of charge such a mass
of death might put on air, which is sometimes clear
with yellow finches and butterflies. That poor heap
is all sleeping meat by design with little affect
I decide in a supermarket, whose sole mystère is
an evocative creak in a wheel. Not unlike a dead stinkbug
on the path, but unlike a little snake I pass over
All night I pictured its bones for a small box of mine
Today I remembered, on my last night you wanted to
linger after the concert, drinking with other couples
like a delicate dragonfly
4
And I can't predict your trauma. Potent and careless
as radiation here, which we call careless, because
we don't suspect anything. Then future form is in doubt
Like a critic I thought form was an equilibrium
which progressed by momentum from some original reduction
of fear to the horizon. But my son's thigh bones
are too long. I seduced myself. I thought
I'll give it a little fish for the unexpected. Its paw
moved. My back-bones are sparking mica on sand
now, that carried messages up and down
5
Glass that melted in the last eruption of the
Valle Grande has cooled, and you can run
among wild iris on a slope, or fireweed in the fall
Its former violence is the landscape, as far as
Oklahoma. Its ontogeny as a thin place scrambles
the plane's radio, repeating the pre-radio dream
At any time, they all tell us, to think of eruption
as a tardy arrival into present form, the temperate crystal
I still see brightness below as night anger, not
because of violence, but its continuousness with the past
while airy light on the plain is merciful and diffuse
that glints on radium pools. I wanted to learn how
to dance last year. I thought your daughter might teach me
6
She did a pretty good job at elucidating something
she didn't understand and had no interest in
out of duty. She has evoked a yen for dance. Any
beat with wind through it. In an apricot tree
were many large birds, and an eagle that takes off
as if tumbling before catching its lift. I thought
it was flight that rumpled the collar down like a broken neck
but then as it climbed, it resembled a man in eagle dress
whose feathers ruffle back because of firm feet
stamping the ground in wind. The other birds discreetly
passed their minutes with old drummers of stamina
but eagles entered swept ground oblivious to other drummers
making streams of rhythm in their repetitions
until pretty soon some of the other ladies' white feet
moved to them, too, bound thickly around the ankles
so their claws look especially small
7
Where I saw their fine cross-hatch was competition
not air moving through air or weather
though the water balloon she tried to dodge
as it wobbled this way and that like big buttocks
before breaking on her shoulder was rain. The rain
is not important. It rains, not very often
but regularly. If I am far from you isn't the current
of missed events between us an invention of potency
like a summer storm at night, or when I see you
A throw of food and household goods from the roof
to all of us became a meteor shower across fixed stars
In their parallel rain I can't judge each gift's distance
8
I looked to my right. Though sun wasn't yet behind
them, it was bright near each tree at the top
of the ridge in silhouette. These were precise
too, on a closer edge outside time, being botanical
I mix outside time and passing time, across
which suspends a net of our distance or map
in veering scale, that oils sinuous ligaments
or dissolves them into a clear liquid of disparates
that cannot be cleaned. Its water glows like wing bars
and remains red and flat in pools. On the way
to that town there were green waist-high meters on the plain
There was a sharp, yellow line on the blacktop
In rain it remains sharp, but its dimension below the road
softens and lengthens through aquifers. The eagles'
wingbones began to stretch open with practicing, so
luminous space in their wings showed against the sky
giving each a great delicacy in turns
9
They took me to the little town where they were
working, because I asked them to take me. To my left
was an old porch with long roof boards going away
from me, on 2 × 8 rafters perpendicular to them
and the falling-down house. Light descended
to my right. Narrow cracks between boards cast
a rain of parallel bright lines across the rafters
which seemed precise and gay in the ghost town
They were outside its time, though with each change in sun
they changed a little in angle and length, systematically
They were outside the carnage of my collaborative seductions
When I touch your skin or hear singers in the dark, I get
so electric, it must be my whole absence pushing
I think, which might finally flow through proper canyons
leaving the big floor emptied of sea, empty again
where there used to be no lights after dark
10
Prosaic magpies arrive about the time ribs begin
to show a beautiful scaffolding over its volume
where the organs were. The buzzard now brings to mind
a defunct windmill with a wheel hub, but no blades. The eagle's
descending back still bears, after enough time has passed
when the event is articulate, and I know its configuration
is not mixed, or our mingling, or the "intent" of a dance
If a bright clearing will form suddenly, we will
already know of it
Tan Tien
As usual, the first gate was modest. It is dilapidated. She can't tell
which bridge crossed the moat, which all cross sand now, disordered with footsteps.
It's a precise overlay of circles on squares, but she has trouble locating
the main avenue and retraces her steps in intense heat for the correct entrance,
which was intentionally blurred, the way a round arch can give onto a red wall,
far enough in back of the arch for sun to light.
If being by yourself separates from your symmetry, which is
the axis of your spine in the concrete sense, but becomes a suspension
in your spine like a layer of sand under the paving stones of a courtyard
or on a plain, you have to humbly seek out a person who can listen to you,
on a street crowded with bicycles at night, their bells ringing.
And any stick or straight line you hold can be your spine,
like a map she is following in French of Tan Tien. She wants space to fall
to each side of her like traction, not weight dispersed within a mirror. At any time,
an echo of what she says will multiply against the walls in balanced,
dizzying jumps like a gyroscope in the heat, but she is alone.
Later, she would remember herself as a carved figure and its shadow on a blank board,
but she is her balancing stick, and the ground to each side of her is its length,
disordered once by an armored car, and once by an urn of flowers at a crossing.
The stick isn't really the temple's bisection around her, like solstice or ancestor.
This Tang Dynasty peach tree would be a parallel levitation in the spine
of the person recording it.
Slowly the hall looms up. The red stair's outline gives way to its duration
as it extends and rises at a low angle.
In comparison to the family, the individual hardly counts, but they all
wait for her at a teahouse inside the wall.
First the gold knob, then blue tiers rise above the highest step,
the same color as the sky.
When one person came to gain its confidence,
she imagines he felt symmetry as flight after his fast among seven meteorites
in the dark. He really felt like a globe revolving within a globe.
Even the most singular or indivisible particle or heavenly sphere will adjust
when the axis extending beyond itself is pushed, or the sphere it is within
is pushed. What she thought was her balance flattens into a stylized dragon
on the marble paving stones.
Yet she's reluctant to leave the compound. Only the emperor
could walk its center line. Now, anyone can imagine how it felt
to bring heaven news. She is trying to remember this in Hong Kong
as the tram pulls suddenly above skyscrapers and the harbor
and she flattens against her seat, like a reversal occurring in the poles,
or what she meant by, no one can imagine how.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from I Love Artists by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Copyright © 2006 Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
from Summits Move with the Tide (1974)Aegean
Perpetual Motion
from Random Possession (1979)
Chronicle
The Reservoir
from The Field for Blue Corn
The Constellation Quilt
from The Heat Bird (1983)
The Heat Bird
from Empathy (1989)
Tan Tien
Chinese Space
Texas
Recitative
Alakanak Break-Up
Fog
Empathy
The Swan
Forms of Politeness
from Honeymoon
from Sphericity (1993)
Ideal
from Endocrinology (1997)
Endocrinology
from Four Year Old Girl (1998)
Irises
Daughter
Health
The Four Year Old Girl
The Doll
Kali
from Nest (2003)
Permanent Home
Dressing Up Our Pets
I Love Morning
Kisses from the Moon
Nest
Hearing
Audience
Safety
Safety
Safety
New Poems
I Love Artists
Concordance
Parallel Lines
Red Quiet
Acknowledgment