I Love Artists. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

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 X 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