Two Poems

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

NEST

1.

My mother-tongue, Chinese, has an immemorial history before me.

I was inserted into it, a motive for my language.

I learned it naturally, filling it with intentions, and will leave it without intent for other children.

My mother and I speak a local language and sometimes our mother-tongue, as in my dream, with its intent.

What to intend in changing the mother-tongue of my daughter, compassion, not being ill, sleep in which she resonates depth like a bell.

“Loving the wind” is equivalent to intention as rhetorical surface, like writing my diary on her skin.

Non-comprehension tips ambivalent matter, as if there were two of us, here: one is Kuan Yin, one is mother-tongue.

Her matter inserted, a motive, is always somewhere else, exiting one language, another without intent, translated as heart.

2.

I want to tell you what’s difficult to admit, that I left home

Change of mother-tongue between us activates an immune system, margin where dwelling and travel are not distinct.

The artifacts throw themselves toward light without becoming signification.

Telling you is not an edge of the light; there’s no margin of a shadow to imply interior.

In my childhood house was a deep porch covered with vines.

Look past our silhouette to silhouettes, like shadows, of guests arriving in the bright yard.

Light in the next room falls on her as she bends to kiss you.

Skylight pours down, then covers the mud wall like cloth.

I observe the lighted field that seems to hang in space in front of me.

Speaking, not filling in, a surface intent, is like a cabinet of artifacts, comparison coexisting with incongruity.

3.

My origin is a linguistic surface like a decorated wall, no little houses at dusk, yellow lights coming on, physical, mute.

Its significance is received outside hearing, decorating simply by opening the view.

Wherever I look is prior absence, no figure, ruin escaping an aesthetic; hammock, electric fan, ghost don’t qualify as guards.

The comfortable interior my guest inhabits is a moving base, states of dwelling that are undetermined, walls cross-hatched like mother-tongue.

A foreign woman occupies a home that’s impersonal, like the nest of a parasite.

Its value is contentless, but photographable in the context of an indigenous population, tipping between physical ease and the freedom of animals accumulating risk.

When the scene is complex, I turn to the audience and comment aloud, then return to the room and language at hand, weakened by whoever didn’t hear me, as if I don’t recognize the room, because my family moved in, while I was away.

As text imbricated with outside, the wall is waves; so I decorate in new mothertongue, plasticity of fragment, cool music.

There’s a lock in it, of the surface.

It still lights apricots in bloom, leaves, skins of organisms, horizon, borders which represent places.

4.

A margin can’t rot, no bloated outline around memories of witnesses, the way origin in the present is riddled with holes.

Pick one and slip through it, like a girl whose body is changing.

Domestic space oozes light through a loophole, mother to mother, so close I can’t catch it through myself it shines through.

My family is vulnerable at the margin, the child, line of a cheek diffusing energy, line of her eye continuing its inner look.

Don’t let her ooze through the loophole in space we inhabit like migrants, light drifting across five windows on the river, drifting functioning as imagination so intimate, our space seems anonymous.

Furnishings, colors, situation are sumptuous in relation to anonymity, textiles like money.

5.

I feel the right to have my invitation accepted, an open house.

Guests appear in other places for other occasions with my invitation, pleading for the secular, the empathic.

Speaking, an artifact, creates a loophole for no rapport, no kinship, no education, on a frontier where wild is a margin of style and rhetoric’s outside that.

In this case, she’d immigrated long ago, so they tried to stay with her as a family.

Speech opens onto a lost area, then contracts to a diffuse margin between metaphor for space and concept of drunk, ill, running away.

Her story began aesthetically, but hysterical acts withdrew it to a floating space of frustration, unself, and a paranoid husband was produced.

Her words are highhanded, awkward, formal.

He hears them as expressions of personal pique and self-indulgence, but won’t say she uses power unfairly in the pose of unhappy mother.

Such topics are prohibited except at the kitchen table, in the car, etc.

It’s said, illustrious persons lead parallel lives which join in eternity, but some lives veer off the straight path to community.

So, I speak with care, but prove authority won’t take me far, because the area’s too large.

In this, daughter, you see more than I did at your age, because you see me.

HEARING

1.

A voice with no one speaking, like the sea, merges with my listening, as if imagining her thinking about me makes me real.

Its matter is attributed to its passing away, a transcendance whose origin had already come apart.

She can’t hear me hearing it, sits informally, foot on her knee, circling real with matter, possible form, for which being touched is the condition of composition.

A basis starts uncontrived, stone on a path exerts pressure on a surface, hand rests on a child’s head.

She’s not speaking words I hear in an undertone.

The loved one’s face radiates a secret the lover touches and distributes to all the places of a stone, bruised foot, barrier for insect, stream, dirt occupied by its shadow like a cut ornament, particle where openness turns to energy, to attention.

My hearing touches my limit on all sides, a community exposed.

Hearing: transparency arms and legs arch over, nest for my limbs when I was young.

2.

A bird falls out of the air, through the anti-weave, into the anti-net, delineating anti-immanence.

Twenty-four crows upstate, each fall is a gestural syllable.

Cover them with a blue cloth of creatures ready to be born, contact like starlight that will arrive, for sure.

Let mothers catch them, raccoon, labrador bitch, girl, interspecies conservative mothers, arms out like foliage, general, no locomotion of their own.

Her matter is spacing in the present when I come along or go away.

It’s experienced as vague, average understanding, but inaccessible.

That’s how a loved girl away is not divided, like virtuous deeds accomplished quietly; she’s the other of myself hearing that’s simultaneous, no relay toward her.

I buy clothes.

Each sequin is an unapplied form of universal, copresence before there was space, internal line of time into hearing, which doesn’t arrive from the meaning of words, like starlight arriving.

She holds a span of real time over this sense of being touched that’s continuous with the copresence of dresses.

3.

Plum blossoms in snow give way to fragile cherry blossoms, blowing mist on water in the foreground to lighted clouds on the horizon.

It’s responsive, not perspective.

The plane tips up and completes our world with transparency, synapse between birdcall and hearing it, pink and shade facets of small waves, butterfly on tongue.

Hearing, then meaning, is an arch of slender arms where I visualize myself the way she thinks about me, energy latent in her mind, openness under the hand on my head.

The light is not real like a collected object, but its direct, concrete application warms real things, concreteness as a luminescent skin of being herself, subject, wife, envelope of human limits of things.

The potlatch settles around me in a house, designating an exterior that’s toward you, not endowing stone with interior.

That depends on deep matter for which a woman opts for deep acting, suppressing irritation at demands of family members by inventing reasons to sympathize with those boors, to feel sincere though alienated from her bodily expression, screen simulation.

Light goes through it to the plane of the sea, of mother-tongue.

In nothing in the beautiful room could I recognize myself.

A nontransparent self is needed, an aesthetics of documentation where images have power, because the drama is real.

They withdraw from matter to representation which gives more agency, point of presence, bird falling along a stitched in and out of my hearing it call and its ceasing to exist.

4.

I found I could take words from one discipline and intersect them with another, such as generous feeling with listening to supplicants.

Empty space intersects with the dignity of stars, of homelessness, health ruined by addiction, to help supplicants.

Trying to be part of the neighborhood, school activism, etc., with serene demeanor of an object not caught in form of fairy or butterfly, wing of an alternation of calmly breathing, alternating with the physical situation, someone ill, someone tortured.

Hearing is the fractality of fragments occurring (that are disintegrating).

Immanence is outside that as absence of the totality of fragments.

Everything shimmers in autumn light.

Her body (translucence, colored leaves) is a surface you try to make transparent, uninscribed, unlined by good deeds, abstaining from lineage.

Join lineation and surface of her body by voice and hearing, small animals, fragments swept away, lost colors of refractions inside cells, feathers, albino, crepe de chine.

Hearing as good annuls being toward another.

It gathers good aesthetically into relationship like a figure, her body as you remember it, as in a family, space behind each person.

During her last weeks, Madame Lucie reached the end of memory.

Present and future prospects shed perspective, so birds flying away remained the same size, although her gaze in memory on beloved children retained the physical latency of hearing them.