Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
from Forms of Politeness
A belief is a word-like object. You can focus your attention on it down to a point,
like desire or memory of a strong feeling. You have a certain amount of control over your feeling
about general human help by changing what you believe, which embodies the memories
your speech is empowered to represent, she says.
Space is material, but seems to open up a beyond, which is thought to defy material in its failure
to speak its content. It still cues this content by links or desires, as to a form of physical appearance.
To the extent that she can reconstruct a context or pornography in her body suitable for a hanged woman,
a contingency is beaten back, critically. In the sense that events happening at the same time are
meaningful, but not connected, there are events which mean nothing, though there is something to mean.
This is an easy way to expect with desire from moment to moment, while the woman was hanging herself,
as if consistency and the quest for certainty were not emotional,
as when a person begins telling a story, leaves move.
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Note: In the early 70’s a woman broke into my parents’ summer house, drank some wine and stole a rope, which she used to hang herself in an orchard nearby, and I have often thought about her.
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This poem was first published in Empathy (Station HIll Press, 1989), and subsequently appeared in I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).