CONJUNCTIONS:2 Spring 1982
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
A critic objects to their "misterian" qualities
I look it up and don't find it, which must relate
to the mysteres in religions. Stepping
across stones in the river which cover
my sound, I startle a big bird who must circle
the meadow to gain height. There is a din
of big wings. A crow loops over and over
me. I can see many feathers gone from its wing
by sky filling in, but it's not the big bird
I walk into the meadow to find what I've already called
an eagle to myself. At first you just notice a heap
like some old asphalt and white stones dumped.
There is a curving belly. The cow's head is away from me
Its corpse is too new to smell, but as an explanation
hasn't identified my bird. Twice I am not sure if light wings
between some bushes are not light through crow feathers
but then I really see the expansive back swoop down
and circle up to another cottonwood and light
It's a buzzard. It has a little red head
You say that's good. They're not so scarce, anymore
It should have been more afraid of me
Fresh wind blows the other way at dawn, so
I'm free to wonder at the kind of charge such a mass
of death might put on the air, which is sometimes clear
with yellow finches and butterflies. That poor leap
is all sleeping meat by design with little affect
I decide in a supermarket whose sole mystere is
an evocative creak in a cart wheel. Not unlike a dead
stinkbug on the path, but unlike a little snake I pass over
All night I pictured its bones for a small box
of mine. Today I remembered, on my last night you
wanted to linger after the concert, and stay drinking
with other couples, like a delicate dragonfly
And I can't predict your trauma. Potent and careless
as radiation here, which we call careless, because
we don't suspect anything. Then future form is in doubt
Like a critic I thought form was an equilibrium
which progressed by momentum from some original reduction
of fear to the horizon, but my son's thigh bones
are too long. I seduced myself. I thought
I'll give it a little fish for the unexpected. Its paw
moved. My back-bones are sparking mica on sand
now, that carried message up and down
Glass that melted in the last eruption of the
Valle Grande has cooled, and you can just 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 tardy arrival into present form, a temperate crystal
But I still see brightness below as night anger
because it's continuous with the past, while airy light
on a plain is merciful diffusion, that glints on radium pools
I wanted to learn how to dance last year. I thought
your daughter might teach me
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 down 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 ground in the wind. The other birds discreetly
passed their minutes with old drummers of stamina
but when eagles entered the swept ground, their old men
were oblivious to other drummers, and made streams
of rhythm in their repetition. Pretty soon
some of the other ladies' white feet moved to them
too, bound tickly around their ankles
so the little claws look especially small
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 a new virility
in flashes, like a summer storm at night, or when I see you.
A throw of food and household goods from a roof
to all of us becomes a meteor shower across fixed stars
In their parallel rain I can't judge each gift's distance
and my arm moves without its magnet, until
she has to aim a large light box of vanilla wafers right to me
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 5 rafters perpendicular to them
and the falling down house. The light was descending
to my right. Narrow cracks between the boards cast
a rain of parallel bright lines on the faces of 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 dancers in the dark, I get
so electric, it must be the whole dam of my absence pushing
I think, which might finally flow through its proper canyons
leaving the big floor emptied of sea, empty again
where there used to be no lights after dark
I looked to my right. Though sun wasn't yet behind
them, it was bright near each tree on the ridge
where they are single, because there can only
be one on the top of a ridge. These were precise
too, but on a closer edge outside time, being botanical
I mix outside time and the passing time, across
which suspends the 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 its pools. On the way
to that town were green waist-high meters on the plain
There was a sharp, yellow dashed 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 their practicing, so
luminous spaces in their wings showed, as you looked at them
against the sky, without any feathers lost
giving each a great delicacy in turns
Prosaic magpies arrive about the time ribs begin
to show a beautiful scaffolding over its volume
where the organs were. The awkward buzzard
now brings to mind a defunct windmill isosceles
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 its biology, or lack of it