The Star Field

Placing our emotion on a field, I said, became a nucleus of space, defined by a rain of light and
interdeterminate contours of a landscape, like the photograph of an explosion, and gave the
travel of your gaze into it, or on me, imaginative weight of the passage along a gulf of space or a
series of aluminum poles.

She walks through rooms of the blue chain-linked fence, a spacious tennis court or rooms on
concrete, instead of the single movement of a room, where sky and earth would come together.

Outside is the field she is thinking about: a category of grey dots on a television screen of star
data, representing no one's experience, but which thrills all who gaze on it, so it must be
experience. And the land at large becomes the light on the land.

A coyote or a flicker's call is transfixed at the moment before its dissemination across the field, a
sediment of, instead of the trace of feeling, the ratio of people to the space. I pass through blue
focal planes, a scene of desire.

The material of the sky adjacent to me eludes me, a pure signifier, shifting sense, the sky or
space a gradation of material, the light a trace of mobility like a trace of light on a sensitive
screen, extended into the plane of the trace and marked by light poles or drawn close by a planet
at the edge.

Your name becomes a trace of light. Through its repetition and deferral, my life protects itself
from blurs, time lapses, flares of the sexual act, its mobility of an afterimage.

Then I can understand the eye's passage into depth as an inability to stand still for you to see.

By: Mei Mei Berssenbrugge

The Virago Book of Love Poetry
edited by Wendy Mulford
A Virago Book
published 1998, Great Britain

Kevin Hogan