I Love Artists - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge New California Poetry

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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 mystere 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

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