I Love Artists - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge New California Poetry

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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.

       Chinese Space

      First there is the gate from the street, then some flowers inside the wall,

      then the inner, roofed gate. It is a very plain wall, without expressionistic means,

      such as contrasting light on paving stones inside the courtyard to the calligraphed foundation stones.

      My grandfather called this the facade or Baroque experience, rendering a courtyard transparent.

      The eye expecting to confront static space experiences a lavish range of optical events,

      such as crickets in Ming jars, their syncopation like the right, then left, then right progress

      into the house, an experience that cannot be sustained in consciousness, because

      your movement itself binds passing time, more than entering directs it.

      A red door lies on a golden mirror with the fascinating solidity and peacefulness of the pond

      in the courtyard, a featureless space of infinite depth where neither unwanted spirits nor light

      could enter directly from outside. It lies within the equally whole space of the yard

      the way we surrounded our individuals, surrounded by a house we could not wholly

      retain in memory. Walking from the inner gate across a bridge which crossed four ways

      over the carp moat, turning right before the ice rink, we pass roses imported from Boston,

      and enter the main courtyard, an open structure like a ruin. This is not remembering,

      but thinking its presence around eccentric details such as a blue and white urn turned up to dry,

      although certain brightnesses contain space, the way white slipcovered chairs with blue seams contain it.

      The potential of becoming great of the space is proportional to its distance away from us,

       a negative perspective, the way the far corner of the pond becomes a corner again as we approach

       on the diagonal, which had been a vanishing point. The grandmother poses beside rose bushes.

       That is to say, a weary, perplexing quality of the rough wall behind her gives a power of tolerance

       beyond the margins of the photograph. Space without expansion, compactness without restriction

       make peculiar and intense account of the separable person from her place in time,

       though many families live in the partitioned house now. The reflecting surface of the pond

       should theoretically manifest too many beings to claim her particular status in the space,

       such as a tiger skin in space.

      After the house was electrically wired in the thirties, he installed a ticker-tape machine connected

       to the American Stock Exchange. Any existence occupies time, he would say in the Chinese version,

       reading stock quotations and meaning the simplicity of the courtyard into a lavish biosphere,

       elevating the fact of its placement to one of our occupation of it, including the macaw speaking Chinese,

       stones representing infinity in the garden. This is how the world appears when the person

       becomes sufficient, i.e., like home, an alternation of fatigue and relief in the flexible shade of date trees,

       making the house part of a channel in space, which had been interior, with mundane fixtures4 as on elevator doors in a hotel, a standing ashtray that is black and white.

      The family poses in front of the hotel, both self-knowing and knowing others at the same time.

       This is so, because human memory as a part of unfinished nature is provided

       for the experience of your unfinished existence.

       Texas

      I used the table as a reference and just did things from there

      in register, to play a form of feeling out to the end, which is

      an air of truth living objects and persons you use take on,

      when you set them together in a certain order, conferring privilege

      on the individual, who will tend to dissolve if his visual presence

      is maintained, into a sensation of meaning, going off by itself.

      First the table is the table. In blue light or in electric light, it has no pathos. Then light separates from the human content, a violet-colored net or immaterial haze, echoing the violet ice plant on the windowsill, where he is the trace of a desire.

      Such emotions are interruptions in landscape and in logic

      brought on by a longing for direct experience, as if her memory of experience

      were the trace of herself. Especially now, when things have been flying apart in all directions,

      she will consider the hotel lobby the inert state of a form. It is the location

      of her appointment. And gray enamel elevator doors are the relational state,

      space behind them being a ground of water or the figure of water. Now,

      she turns her camera on them to change her thinking about them into a thought

       in Mexico, as the horizon when you are moving can oppose the horizon inside

      the elevator via a blue Cadillac into a long tracking shot. You linger

      over your hand at the table. The light becomes a gold wing on the table. She sees

      it 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

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