I Love Artists. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

concentrate on what he is saying. The snow around him has

      frozen into patterns of wavy lines, so there are luminous blue

      shadows all around you. This is obviously an instrument for his

      location which her voice occupies. It grates across

      pointed places in the form of vapor trails.

      t is so mild, you are beginning to confuse your destination with

      your location. Your location is all the planes of the animal

      reconstituting itself in front of you.

      2

      Anyone who is all right would not be coming in covered with fog.

      It is a pattern when it is moving. When it is moving collisions

      of things that happen produce a wavering but recognizable image

      that merges into the ground when it is still. It is a black diamond

      that condenses you mentally as it collapses. It is a black diamond

      on the ground, and the diamond is moving. Then it disappears

      when you look at it, yourself having no coincidence.

      The ground is covered with ice.

      Many holes in the ice are glowing with light.

      You could say one light is a slanting plank that interrupts the ice. It

      could be a bridge, except where new ice is closing it off into a small

      enclosure like a holding pen or a bed. The human shines through from behind

      and below seams and holes in the ice. The human hovers like a mood.

      On a molecular level, the human remains, as a delicate glittering accent

      on the dateline, like a light flashing upriver, which can only be seen

      by the first person who looks on it, because her looking is equivalent

      to clocking its velocity in a chute or a tunnel to her.

      She considers these the unconscious lessons of a dominant force

      that is being born, and as it becomes, its being is received structure.

      First ice crystals, then heavier glass obscures the light,

      so she walks back and forth talking to herself, in a white soundless

      sphere past the trash of the village.

      She crosses pressure ridges that form a fringe between old ice

      and open water. And the ice responds to her haphazardous movement.

      Snow is moving about the ice, some of it settling, some of it blowing.

      She notices certain portions are ice, while others are covered with snow,

      which is easy to make tracks on. And she is careful not to step on the snow.

      Twenty miles of frozen ridges buckle with snow,

      but when she travels under the ice, the ice would be like fog. Inside the fog,

      there is a jail fire. Flames lure a quantity

      of what is going to happen to her into equivocalness,

      by softening her body with heat, as if the house she is in

      suddenly rises, because people still want her.

      She prefers to lie down like a river, when it is frozen in the valley,

      and lie still, but bright lines go back and forth

      from her mouth, as she vomits out salt water.

      This is the breakthrough in plane. The plane itself is silent.

      Above and behind the plain lies the frozen delta. Above and in

      front of her, fog sinks into the horizon, with silence as a material.

      So, she is walking among formations of rock. Once again, she can make

      a rock in a distant wash move closer to her, where it splays out

      like contents its occurrence there. Once again, her solitariness

      can flow into the present moment, although she seems to know what

      is going to happen.

      This is an image represented by a line of ice slabs facing a line

      of rocks. One rock seems a little heavier and darker than the others,

      but for now, they are two lines of tinkling unaccompanied voices.

      The rest can be correspondingly inferred, as a line of rocks

      leading toward a distant mountain, as into a distorting mirror,

      which once again grows darker and denser, crossing over into mass

      for a while, before returning to the little saxophone repetition

      with which it began, like rubble under her feet.

      Still, anything can still happen. She is still unable to distinguish

      one wave from another. This is her nervous system attempting

      to maintain its sweep across the plain.

      Everything is still moving, and everything is still one texture,

      altered from sheer space to the texture of a wall.

      The route-through tightens around the nervous system, like a musculature.

      It floats like a black mountain against the night sky, although she will remember

      a mountain glimmering with ore. Then it darkens for her return.

      The river branches and the sea has become blank as mirrors each

      branch of the river flows into.

      3

      Sometimes I think my spirit is resting in the darkness of my stomach.

      The snow becomes light at the end of the winter. The summer

      is an interruption of intervals that disappear, like his little dance

      before the main dances, a veridical drug.

      A wafer of space beneath the ice starts to descend, like

      the edge of her sleeve across a camera lens. Pretty soon

      the ice will be all broken up. There is no space left. You look

      down on a break-up of little clouds over the plain, as if the house

      you are in suddenly rises, to relieve the nervous pressure of light.

      Twenty miles of frozen ridges become a lace of moss

      and puddles too flat to see and which are breathing. Here is

      a snowdrift that has begun to melt. Here is an old woman

      talking about a young person who is androgynous, across a distortion

      of radio waves, trying to locate you. She is only moving

      from her knees down.

      The snow becomes light at the end of winter. How ice changes

      on either side of the boat is not a tactic. The drum is a boat.

      The mail route is a line of controlled electric light.

      They will scatter their clothes anywhere in this light. You leave

      your shirt near the snowmobile. It is initial color on the tundra.

       Fog

      1

      Hundreds of millions of years ago, days were many hours shorter.

      All things, sounds, stories and beings were related, and this complexity was more obvious. It was not simplified by ideas of relationship in one person's mind.

      Paths of energy were forced to stay in the present