Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

 

SUSIE, KIKI, ANNIE

1

On its own terms, my project with them developed a gentle momentum.

The vulnerability of their situation engendered a spirit o play and togetherness.

Going to work, I passed several family members standing in a group, close together.

I asked each one to tell me his or her thoughts, and I tried to remember them all.

My sister has just fixed the motorcycle of her friend Tom, and she's waiting for him.

Among them, a fox turns to look at me, as if in nature, but she's drawn it, it's symbolic.

What can someone who looks like my sister encompass on a different level, if she were not my sister, or if I had no knowledge of the formal relation?

A projector in dark casts a line of light under the door.

Energy of the gap between my sister and strategy that construes her for pure appearance
disperses along the web of family interrelations.

There's a stringent, physical link, but what goes on inside seems close to freedom I know
as my power of imagination, so strong, it appears as a deliberate loss of information.

One fox, an open structure, empties like a funnel.

One fox enters the world.

It does not appear to be an image.

There's a relation between them in which she is involved, walking between two animals
asleep in late light like blood.

I'm interested in the alleged realism of the fox, while she sees it as actually behind the
scenes.

They watch me in suspense.

There's the mute probability of a reciprocal lack of understanding.

Lately, I've been interested in failing to make something exciting, equating the act of
walking from one tree to another with understanding.

I try to speak to her in a way in which she might take me seriously and answer back.

2

The situation is an image of her gathering a toy horse from beside each candle, of my sister on a white horse, of the horse stepping backwards in water.

She stands there for a long time, then takes out o her pocket one of the toy horses.

She tells me about it, as I were also a lover of horses, which I am not, as she well knows.

The way in which she shares her happiness, as a matter of course, gives me a sense of guilt, because I do not feel the happiness.

All the animals in the story, who eventually die, consist of tiny lines scratched into reddish dark ground.

The white of an eye is scratched away.

Many appear sleepy, as I just wakened up-squirrel, little cat, fawn.

She wears an oily smock and clogs with a rubber daisy on each one.

Light glints off her glasses, as she waits with an awkwardness that's both conspicuous and nonchalant.

She feels their presence in the woods as a priori mottled light subject to decline.

In this story of defeat and disappointment, uncertainty, interference, malfunction transcended by a present situation of competent employment?

She loses track of her thought, then resumes, laughing at herself.

The horse takes a small jump in the air, and her head and shoulders arch back.

3

I see Minnie Mouse, instead of a thin girl in a cotton smock.

The ambiguity releases energy.

No one enters the family unit, except through the magnetism of this energy.

Stolid girl's scowl like an old man, wild girls in a meadow in the afternoon, are subject to evaluation in which cheapness cannot be avoid.

She marks time with her hand, and the horse curls its neck and head around her, light shining through etched lines of its mane in the arena.

Their coalescence inundates like theatre.

It's an aspect of the artificial linked with sleeping, dreaming, addiction.

I wonder about the effect of cheap emotion, but give in to collective phenomena, teddy bears, flowers.

I place a vase of red water by the door of the theater, trying to push an uncertain situation into wild association of spirit as nature and my sister's visualizations of it chimera.

The horse dances in a mirror of water, steps back and awkwardly lowers itself onto its haunches.

A stranger on the phone says, I know who are you and what you do.

I'm helpless to suspend his narrative from which something real is taking form.

Animals, real red cushions scattered on the floor.

The small group walks upstairs, shoulder to shoulder.

My awkward sister, still waiting, is proud of her work.

She washed the motorcycle, it's shining.

The room fills with movement, noise, and the uncertainty of physical contact could change, losing themselves watching a girl dance to her walkman in the hall.

I saw them crowded together in their jackets and heard sounds of wild birds.

Odd objects remembered against a background of intimate traces, spindle, a packet of dried fruit, are left as they were.

A sense of deferral has been added to this weave of naiveté, humor, fragility, but our relationship has in face ended.