Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
Pure Immanence
1
I don’t feel connected to what I experience, and I speak with him about it.
I try to connect through the outline of an animal, starting with our dog, then turn to a black wing against the sky.
When I see a picture of the beloved animal, I think of that animal, who isn’t here.
The principle of association moves me beyond an image to belief, and passion fixes my mind on Chaco.
A mobile relation to perception precedes affect.
Through it I experience from material a screen of surroundings I slice through, like sun through woods onto a golden pool.
A flash to other reality associates to other life, other environment also filled with precious belongings and loved ones, so immediate.
A world may be affirmed by the turn of a wing out of the corner of my eye.
Blue overhead deepens, the flex of an animal flank, the horizon line of the mountain darkens and lowers.
2
It makes of my experience a critique of innateness, the way a pink plastic chair, a mannequin in a pink bunny suit holding a painting of sunset accretes virtual rouge defining a space that doesn’t refer to objects or belong to me.
I could mistake it for something fractal, shattered; it’s the opposite of that.
No matter how close two sensations, passing from one to another pink is the slice through.
Innateness spreads like sunset across mountains.
I connect with sensation now as to pink petals forming toward me, those who love me in another life responding to me.
There’s no time, so at sunset love from others can look like one rose.
3
I dream all plants and animals communicate.
Energies of the environment and of inhabitants merge in a kind of horizon of one dream to another.
There’s a transfer of data to systems in which symbols come alive.
I hear a whirring of wings, like finches around the feeder.
Something ordinary may be my experience of a symbol in the day.
These inner fields of reference move with evaluations between selves, trying to make of relation something beautiful like choosing a gift--tiny tree with rock crystal leaves, clamshell inlaid like butterfly wings.
They seem to unify by the inherent interest of beauty, like love from friends who are gone slicing into the present, though I’m unable to accept their support, even as they sense my need.
By illness, I mean my life reduced to reactive, devotional processes.
When I say, Oh I’d do this, maybe I will, but my plans are still a sick person’s.
In other time, I go over an event to assimilate it.
Asleep, I see light around the corner.
A tree with foliage grows more intently focused, as if dream-words finally bring forth a physical tree, but more aware, so its identity doesn’t stop where bark stops.
It can follow identity out to space around the trunk and feel it continue into the atmosphere, but I don’t want to be so dependent on tree, situation, that coming across a symptom I’ve experienced before, I reflexively categorize it.
Each time I dream yellow foliage, it’s in different light.
I’m not weak like a man chasing a hare until he’s exhausted, who complains when you overtake him and seize his prey.
(Immobility, unnatural to the hare, came close to the hunter.)
4
My wishes aren’t separate from the environment, which is a portion of connectivity, with new species emerging all the time.
I myself may be part of an emergence, dizzy, unaware I’ve crossed a threshold into new focus.
I don’t see the released body of a slain animal running away, cavorting on the hillside.
For you, so tentative, new species would be theoretical, as if they were future luminaries.
There are beings who combine what I diversify, qualities of environment and qualities of self.
My thoughts operate as electrons, there.
They’re not wasted after I think them, but go on, for example, stimulating an exchange of my genes with gardens, artwork, the economy.
My thoughts generate their own thoughts and their thoughts think thoughts with subjective acuity.
I grieve you only read a thought, as it is to you.
You can’t track its position in my consciousness as it speeds away from us, even as I’m thinking it.
You discern just the thought of my thought in stop motion, like one feather of a wing.
I photographed a tree growing from a stone; I photographed the bowed heads of two adults looking at a girl.
The tree exemplifies nature as it relates with humans, feeling around the edges of our concepts, sensing openings in our awareness and forming alliances.
It enjoys contributing to our life, though there’s no individual consciousness, per se.
The “tree” just chooses to focus western juniper, volcanic basalt.
WINTER WHITE
1
Now memory widens its focus.
An experience is not one experience.
I go over it again and again, as it assimilates in me.
Repeating becomes more like an associative process.
I can’t depend on an event so thinking of it, it’s instantly categorized, as if by a student.
I follow as it slips beyond the border of my recall, where repeating becomes progressive.
And memory doesn’t end where my skin ends, but diffuses into my surroundings, leaving fragments of itself I may notice as “red rock,” “friable cliff," reminding me.
2
Looking into sky and so backward in time depends on my belief in origins and on the effects of my attention.
There, a butterfly is a live portion of earth flying, deer a portion of its leafy surface.
Forgetting loses indeterminance as it fills out the plane of immanence, like the universe in infinity.
My so-called memory of my experience is an index, in which self comes into being at the same time as the butterfly.
That’s why environment can’t be identified by a consciousness that’s coextensive with it.
More and more an experience becomes a contingent particle.
Recognizing and observing combine into a relation or inference fueled by emotion as by low tones of his voice, a limit or association based on partiality-- my interest, my mother, family, certain writers, western light--as when I look at his image in a magazine, I think of Richard who isn’t here.
Then I look for the invisible wires of this passage.
3
Between any experiences, memories, objects are silent rhythms and intervals.
I go over an event as it develops beyond anxiety at whether a blank is in my mind and red rock in the world or whether transparency is landscape.
Sunlight, night, despair and gems or solitude, reef, star dissolving into names make eventless the poet’s experience.
Your face before me is an epiphany for distance and crossing.
It’s not a dialectic of self-other, like threads of pink light through mist or pink veins of a petal on my desk.
Mist and petal together form their own pathway, percepts threading back and forth as if through live wires in air.
Hue accumulates around my intense desire to recall.
My mood changes with slices of color into reality I categorize as afternoon sky; pink disintegrating in the petal is a transparent vein.
Its form represents materialized accumulated energies moving toward me, when I tried to express the amnesia, immanence leading me from a photograph to recast light onto experience, until identification, sameness became the atmosphere.
4
A white out of wintry weather: I did not think feeling proceeded from anything like this.
Details of landscape is how a person losing her memory visualizes the panoply of experience.
Recalling a face is only part of the visual; there’s turbulence between light reflecting from your face into my brain and my emotion as one-to-one recollection from an ideal vantage point.
Light itself is forming darkness and spectrums exist outside light’s laws.
Spaces in my living room between objects or spaces between stars are only symbols; blankness is filled with experience.
A collective unconscious of all experience underlies events along an electron’s path, because space is a psychological property.
I don’t pinpoint your location like a chair and bureau on a dreamed floor.
I see light around a corner, combinations of others’ memories adjacent to mine and polyvalent.
Instead of blankness, fear takes the form of an argument in the family or a series of frightful dreams.
An event can weave through these manifestations, dissipating itself along with my own borders.
Illness turns into such a nightmare, but self maintains, operating as a wave.
Different species communicate and energies of environment and inhabitants merge.
My memory travels into the memory of another with increasing energy, and an event clarifies as “winter,” for example.
KARMIC TRACE
1
An alder leaf drifts out with the tide, bumps into one of 42 mergensers swimming near shore and floats on.
The duck dives and comes up in a minute.
Slowly a bank of clouds nears, and it rains.
My mood you might call nostalgia, fear, is desire to interweave here with green.
Light wind is an elixir of pine needles.
Autumn-blue sky between branches narrates a kinship between air and awareness, two sisters, anima and atmosphere.
At each step walking with her, I discover wider difference between myself and the alder, measured as a difference in feeling, a different way of describing the same sky, same ground, rain, as our relation is a kind of open circuit sparking with things in rain, the way boulders, trees, bushes, hill move and brighten in relation to each other as we walk, trees seeming to continually open a corridor ahead of us.
My sister and I draw together here by the alder at a spider on which we focus, as though spider, deer in brush, moving shadows, grasses are parts constituting relationship.
Our own reflections are part of the play of sunlight and its reflections
2
Deeper in the forest, it’s quiet, second-growth, white pines unperturbed by wind, trunks fissured with seams and crossed by lines of ants, by inchworms, bark beetles.
A woodpecker’s knock is baffled by moss and pine needles, fallen cedars rotting among ferns, scent of balsam and seaweed.
I saw the screens of life as flat displays I could enter to empathize, `experience, then come out to observe.
Today, “screen” is this corridor through trees, an actual passageway.
A bumblebee flies in and out of my shadow, shining, then shining again.
Its outline on moss is the outermost topological surface through shaded space between bee and ground.
Before, I and mossy trunks or I and she did not inhabit the same space.
There wasn’t depth between myself and trees, since I saw them from a place outside their world in the audience.
I could slip along an alignment, vector or corrIdor, feeling my care and affection, then slip out and transform care into just the periphery of a spacious interior.
The green cave of a waterfall has this sense of interiority of surrounding cosmos.
Our perceived world under blue has cosmological interiority, as the relation of the whole cosmos to description, and characters breathe within this volume.
Stars in polygons between branches are not situated in space, but actively deploy or secrete space between them,
And cosmos is unfolding.
3
Great oak leaning so far over water, there is not one entity at the center of my fear of losing someone.
There’s a sense of place as continual emergence from implicit existence and from the aspirations of inhabitants.
Time refers to this psychological latency of enveloping landscape and its affinity with the present.
A flat rock, waist high, is covered with oxalis, because a break in the trees lets in sunlight.
A rock with flowers is mnemonic for the event of light, and for nearby tall rocks we pass between, lime and umber with lichen.
The present expands to an enveloping cloud the precise shape and contour of enveloping landscape, as though this were its native shape.
Then one trajectory of experience passes out toward vastness.
The horizon, by withholding its presence-beyond holds open the land, then my fear is more like an ornament, rose.
Our recognition of a place is luminosity.
Within it can be built a chapel, health, long life, anything, when there’s enough space.
4
I wish her rapport with a cool wind pouring down the slope behind our house, fragrant with pine.
It issues through a break in the hills, and we can walk to a place by the shore to meet it.
Wind is a close ally of crows; I hear one squawk as we approach and see it on a boulder jutting out of water in low tide.
It hops twice looking at us, then squawks again and suddenly swerves toward us, expanding, banks and lands on a rock nearby.
With its shadow, it seems the size of a person who’s farther away, but it’s really close, ready to play.
Seeing became a streaming exchange of myself with the bird; I looked with a bird’s sentience; my body became a kind of distributed thing and the land a kind of distributed feeling.
Later, I‘m depressed and frightened; something that happened ripens.
The feeling is like a keyword or letter representing my experience and also the continuum from individual to a consensus or fate seeming to rise over us, like a direction or corridor.
My sense of foreboding from the raven and for my sister moves across the sky, a dense red sun.
The letter’s power activates with an insect crawling through its cracks or water flowing along its contours or the breeze I want for another breathing across it.
Fear rises and dissipates into the forest, because of my happiness walking with you and my desire for time, the nutriment.
Time projects onto the screen, whereas its dissipation is a kind of luminosity without images of any kind, this salutary gleam on feathers.
I feel joy, but it is relative.
5
A rocky point leading north into the bay becomes a small island at high tide.
A hollow in the middle of the island replenishes twice a day with periwinkles, starfish, sea urchins, tiny pilot fish, pond spiders.
I see Blue Hill in the west and Cadillac Mountain in the east, anchoring a blue sphere.
The surface of the pool reflects sky.
I focus on ripples moving across the pool with my sister beside me, and ripples begin to speak, describe, like animated words on a page or telling you clouds, owls asleep in oak trees, mica in pink schist.
A rabbit visits at the edge of the shore, who does not hold fear in the manner we project on her; when a fox starts chasing her, I sense the stream of energy intrinsic between them, a shimmering stream like infrared following rabbit and fox and preceding them simultaneously, not in time.
I smell a line of musk, actual energy, trailing the rabbit as she experiences deep fear at the level where fears both come into existence and are nearly ready to escape innocence, inexperience, where many fears hide.
Hold the images of a rabbit and star together.
__________
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently, Hello, the Roses (New Directions) and The Lit Cloud, a collaboration with Kiki Smith. She lives in northern New Mexico and New York City.
Pure Immanence
1
I don’t feel connected to what I experience, and I speak with him about it.
I try to connect through the outline of an animal, starting with our dog, then turn to a black wing against the sky.
When I see a picture of the beloved animal, I think of that animal, who isn’t here.
The principle of association moves me beyond an image to belief, and passion fixes my mind on Chaco.
A mobile relation to perception precedes affect.
Through it I experience from material a screen of surroundings I slice through, like sun through woods onto a golden pool.
A flash to other reality associates to other life, other environment also filled with precious belongings and loved ones, so immediate.
A world may be affirmed by the turn of a wing out of the corner of my eye.
Blue overhead deepens, the flex of an animal flank, the horizon line of the mountain darkens and lowers.
2
It makes of my experience a critique of innateness, the way a pink plastic chair, a mannequin in a pink bunny suit holding a painting of sunset accretes virtual rouge defining a space that doesn’t refer to objects or belong to me.
I could mistake it for something fractal, shattered; it’s the opposite of that.
No matter how close two sensations, passing from one to another pink is the slice through.
Innateness spreads like sunset across mountains.
I connect with sensation now as to pink petals forming toward me, those who love me in another life responding to me.
There’s no time, so at sunset love from others can look like one rose.
3
I dream all plants and animals communicate.
Energies of the environment and of inhabitants merge in a kind of horizon of one dream to another.
There’s a transfer of data to systems in which symbols come alive.
I hear a whirring of wings, like finches around the feeder.
Something ordinary may be my experience of a symbol in the day.
These inner fields of reference move with evaluations between selves, trying to make of relation something beautiful like choosing a gift--tiny tree with rock crystal leaves, clamshell inlaid like butterfly wings.
They seem to unify by the inherent interest of beauty, like love from friends who are gone slicing into the present, though I’m unable to accept their support, even as they sense my need.
By illness, I mean my life reduced to reactive, devotional processes.
When I say, Oh I’d do this, maybe I will, but my plans are still a sick person’s.
In other time, I go over an event to assimilate it.
Asleep, I see light around the corner.
A tree with foliage grows more intently focused, as if dream-words finally bring forth a physical tree, but more aware, so its identity doesn’t stop where bark stops.
It can follow identity out to space around the trunk and feel it continue into the atmosphere, but I don’t want to be so dependent on tree, situation, that coming across a symptom I’ve experienced before, I reflexively categorize it.
Each time I dream yellow foliage, it’s in different light.
I’m not weak like a man chasing a hare until he’s exhausted, who complains when you overtake him and seize his prey.
(Immobility, unnatural to the hare, came close to the hunter.)
4
My wishes aren’t separate from the environment, which is a portion of connectivity, with new species emerging all the time.
I myself may be part of an emergence, dizzy, unaware I’ve crossed a threshold into new focus.
I don’t see the released body of a slain animal running away, cavorting on the hillside.
For you, so tentative, new species would be theoretical, as if they were future luminaries.
There are beings who combine what I diversify, qualities of environment and qualities of self.
My thoughts operate as electrons, there.
They’re not wasted after I think them, but go on, for example, stimulating an exchange of my genes with gardens, artwork, the economy.
My thoughts generate their own thoughts and their thoughts think thoughts with subjective acuity.
I grieve you only read a thought, as it is to you.
You can’t track its position in my consciousness as it speeds away from us, even as I’m thinking it.
You discern just the thought of my thought in stop motion, like one feather of a wing.
I photographed a tree growing from a stone; I photographed the bowed heads of two adults looking at a girl.
The tree exemplifies nature as it relates with humans, feeling around the edges of our concepts, sensing openings in our awareness and forming alliances.
It enjoys contributing to our life, though there’s no individual consciousness, per se.
The “tree” just chooses to focus western juniper, volcanic basalt.
WINTER WHITE
1
Now memory widens its focus.
An experience is not one experience.
I go over it again and again, as it assimilates in me.
Repeating becomes more like an associative process.
I can’t depend on an event so thinking of it, it’s instantly categorized, as if by a student.
I follow as it slips beyond the border of my recall, where repeating becomes progressive.
And memory doesn’t end where my skin ends, but diffuses into my surroundings, leaving fragments of itself I may notice as “red rock,” “friable cliff," reminding me.
2
Looking into sky and so backward in time depends on my belief in origins and on the effects of my attention.
There, a butterfly is a live portion of earth flying, deer a portion of its leafy surface.
Forgetting loses indeterminance as it fills out the plane of immanence, like the universe in infinity.
My so-called memory of my experience is an index, in which self comes into being at the same time as the butterfly.
That’s why environment can’t be identified by a consciousness that’s coextensive with it.
More and more an experience becomes a contingent particle.
Recognizing and observing combine into a relation or inference fueled by emotion as by low tones of his voice, a limit or association based on partiality-- my interest, my mother, family, certain writers, western light--as when I look at his image in a magazine, I think of Richard who isn’t here.
Then I look for the invisible wires of this passage.
3
Between any experiences, memories, objects are silent rhythms and intervals.
I go over an event as it develops beyond anxiety at whether a blank is in my mind and red rock in the world or whether transparency is landscape.
Sunlight, night, despair and gems or solitude, reef, star dissolving into names make eventless the poet’s experience.
Your face before me is an epiphany for distance and crossing.
It’s not a dialectic of self-other, like threads of pink light through mist or pink veins of a petal on my desk.
Mist and petal together form their own pathway, percepts threading back and forth as if through live wires in air.
Hue accumulates around my intense desire to recall.
My mood changes with slices of color into reality I categorize as afternoon sky; pink disintegrating in the petal is a transparent vein.
Its form represents materialized accumulated energies moving toward me, when I tried to express the amnesia, immanence leading me from a photograph to recast light onto experience, until identification, sameness became the atmosphere.
4
A white out of wintry weather: I did not think feeling proceeded from anything like this.
Details of landscape is how a person losing her memory visualizes the panoply of experience.
Recalling a face is only part of the visual; there’s turbulence between light reflecting from your face into my brain and my emotion as one-to-one recollection from an ideal vantage point.
Light itself is forming darkness and spectrums exist outside light’s laws.
Spaces in my living room between objects or spaces between stars are only symbols; blankness is filled with experience.
A collective unconscious of all experience underlies events along an electron’s path, because space is a psychological property.
I don’t pinpoint your location like a chair and bureau on a dreamed floor.
I see light around a corner, combinations of others’ memories adjacent to mine and polyvalent.
Instead of blankness, fear takes the form of an argument in the family or a series of frightful dreams.
An event can weave through these manifestations, dissipating itself along with my own borders.
Illness turns into such a nightmare, but self maintains, operating as a wave.
Different species communicate and energies of environment and inhabitants merge.
My memory travels into the memory of another with increasing energy, and an event clarifies as “winter,” for example.
KARMIC TRACE
1
An alder leaf drifts out with the tide, bumps into one of 42 mergensers swimming near shore and floats on.
The duck dives and comes up in a minute.
Slowly a bank of clouds nears, and it rains.
My mood you might call nostalgia, fear, is desire to interweave here with green.
Light wind is an elixir of pine needles.
Autumn-blue sky between branches narrates a kinship between air and awareness, two sisters, anima and atmosphere.
At each step walking with her, I discover wider difference between myself and the alder, measured as a difference in feeling, a different way of describing the same sky, same ground, rain, as our relation is a kind of open circuit sparking with things in rain, the way boulders, trees, bushes, hill move and brighten in relation to each other as we walk, trees seeming to continually open a corridor ahead of us.
My sister and I draw together here by the alder at a spider on which we focus, as though spider, deer in brush, moving shadows, grasses are parts constituting relationship.
Our own reflections are part of the play of sunlight and its reflections
2
Deeper in the forest, it’s quiet, second-growth, white pines unperturbed by wind, trunks fissured with seams and crossed by lines of ants, by inchworms, bark beetles.
A woodpecker’s knock is baffled by moss and pine needles, fallen cedars rotting among ferns, scent of balsam and seaweed.
I saw the screens of life as flat displays I could enter to empathize, `experience, then come out to observe.
Today, “screen” is this corridor through trees, an actual passageway.
A bumblebee flies in and out of my shadow, shining, then shining again.
Its outline on moss is the outermost topological surface through shaded space between bee and ground.
Before, I and mossy trunks or I and she did not inhabit the same space.
There wasn’t depth between myself and trees, since I saw them from a place outside their world in the audience.
I could slip along an alignment, vector or corrIdor, feeling my care and affection, then slip out and transform care into just the periphery of a spacious interior.
The green cave of a waterfall has this sense of interiority of surrounding cosmos.
Our perceived world under blue has cosmological interiority, as the relation of the whole cosmos to description, and characters breathe within this volume.
Stars in polygons between branches are not situated in space, but actively deploy or secrete space between them,
And cosmos is unfolding.
3
Great oak leaning so far over water, there is not one entity at the center of my fear of losing someone.
There’s a sense of place as continual emergence from implicit existence and from the aspirations of inhabitants.
Time refers to this psychological latency of enveloping landscape and its affinity with the present.
A flat rock, waist high, is covered with oxalis, because a break in the trees lets in sunlight.
A rock with flowers is mnemonic for the event of light, and for nearby tall rocks we pass between, lime and umber with lichen.
The present expands to an enveloping cloud the precise shape and contour of enveloping landscape, as though this were its native shape.
Then one trajectory of experience passes out toward vastness.
The horizon, by withholding its presence-beyond holds open the land, then my fear is more like an ornament, rose.
Our recognition of a place is luminosity.
Within it can be built a chapel, health, long life, anything, when there’s enough space.
4
I wish her rapport with a cool wind pouring down the slope behind our house, fragrant with pine.
It issues through a break in the hills, and we can walk to a place by the shore to meet it.
Wind is a close ally of crows; I hear one squawk as we approach and see it on a boulder jutting out of water in low tide.
It hops twice looking at us, then squawks again and suddenly swerves toward us, expanding, banks and lands on a rock nearby.
With its shadow, it seems the size of a person who’s farther away, but it’s really close, ready to play.
Seeing became a streaming exchange of myself with the bird; I looked with a bird’s sentience; my body became a kind of distributed thing and the land a kind of distributed feeling.
Later, I‘m depressed and frightened; something that happened ripens.
The feeling is like a keyword or letter representing my experience and also the continuum from individual to a consensus or fate seeming to rise over us, like a direction or corridor.
My sense of foreboding from the raven and for my sister moves across the sky, a dense red sun.
The letter’s power activates with an insect crawling through its cracks or water flowing along its contours or the breeze I want for another breathing across it.
Fear rises and dissipates into the forest, because of my happiness walking with you and my desire for time, the nutriment.
Time projects onto the screen, whereas its dissipation is a kind of luminosity without images of any kind, this salutary gleam on feathers.
I feel joy, but it is relative.
5
A rocky point leading north into the bay becomes a small island at high tide.
A hollow in the middle of the island replenishes twice a day with periwinkles, starfish, sea urchins, tiny pilot fish, pond spiders.
I see Blue Hill in the west and Cadillac Mountain in the east, anchoring a blue sphere.
The surface of the pool reflects sky.
I focus on ripples moving across the pool with my sister beside me, and ripples begin to speak, describe, like animated words on a page or telling you clouds, owls asleep in oak trees, mica in pink schist.
A rabbit visits at the edge of the shore, who does not hold fear in the manner we project on her; when a fox starts chasing her, I sense the stream of energy intrinsic between them, a shimmering stream like infrared following rabbit and fox and preceding them simultaneously, not in time.
I smell a line of musk, actual energy, trailing the rabbit as she experiences deep fear at the level where fears both come into existence and are nearly ready to escape innocence, inexperience, where many fears hide.
Hold the images of a rabbit and star together.
__________
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently, Hello, the Roses (New Directions) and The Lit Cloud, a collaboration with Kiki Smith. She lives in northern New Mexico and New York City.