Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is a celebrated contemporary poet known for her deeply meditative, philosophical, and nature-inspired poetry. Her work blends elements of perception, consciousness, and the physical world, often creating a quiet, reflective atmosphere that invites readers to slow down and think.
Berssenbrugge’s poems are unique because they don’t follow traditional storytelling or structure. Instead, they move like streams of thought—fluid, open, and exploratory. She often writes in long, flowing sentences that feel almost like conversations with the self. Her language is simple yet layered with meaning, making her poetry both accessible and intellectually rich.
A key theme in her work is the relationship between the human mind and the natural world. Influenced by her life in places like New Mexico, her poems frequently reflect landscapes, light, space, and stillness. She explores how we perceive reality and how emotions connect us to our surroundings.
Her collections, such as Hello, the Roses and A Treatise on Stars, show her ability to merge science, philosophy, and art into poetry. Berssenbrugge’s work is not about quick understanding—it’s about experience. Reading her poems feels like entering a calm, thoughtful space where ideas unfold gently over time.
Overall, her poetry stands out for its quiet intensity, intellectual depth, and beautiful attention to perception and being.
from "Consciousness Self-Learns"
By Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
1
Plants and rocks lay under night sky; ground is a subject of sky; the relation's a force.
I combine descriptions with ideas of forces; my photograph of night sky's like a text of symbols.
Look inside when you are struggling; every cell in your body emits light.
Cilia beat rhythms into space, signaling cells of wildflowers in a field, signaling sky.
I connect to it, holding the hand of our friend, who's sleeping.
When I look at a constellation, I construct lines from indivisible points, bind seeing to an infinity of points and single brights, at the same time.
I may not recall these thoughts tomorrow, and I'm anxious, as if stars had extinguished.
Then, talking to you about his illness provokes tension, disagreement that stirs in my memory lost thoughts.
Our difference became a permeable membrane between each person and the whole.
Even though my mind focused within bounds, it's indivisible from sky I see, because seeing is as a field.
Looking is an innate impulse toward wholeness.
Hello, the Roses
By Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
1
My soul radially whorls out to the edges of my body, according to the same laws
by which stars shine, communicating with my body by emanation.
When you see her, you feel the impact of what visual can mean.
Invisibility comes through of deep pink or a color I see clairvoyantly.
This felt sense at seeing the rose extends, because light in the DNA of my cells
receives light frequencies of the flower as a hologram.
The entire rose, petals in moving air, emotion of perfume records as a sphere, so
when I recall the emotion, I touch dimensionality.
From a small bud emerges a tight wound bundle of babyskin coral petals, held in
a half globe, as if by cupped hands.
Then petals are innumerable, loose, double, sumptuous, unified.
I look through parted fingers to soften my gaze, so slow light shining off the
object is filtered; then with feeling I look at swift color there.
It's swiftness that seems still as noon light, because my seeing travels at the same
speed.
I make a reciprocal balance between light falling on the back of my eye to optic
nerve to pineal gland, radiance stepping down to matter, and my future self
opening out from this sight.
A moment extends to time passing as sense impression of a rose, including new
joys where imagined roses, roses I haven't yet seen or seen in books record as my
experience.
Then experience is revelation, because plants and people have in their cells
particles of light that can become coherent, that radiate out physically and also
with the creativity of metaphor, as in a beam of light holographically, i.e., by
intuition, in which I inhale the perfume of the Bourbon rose, then try to separate
what is scent, sense, and what you call memory, what is emotion, where in a
dialogue like touching is it so vibratory and so absorbent of my attention and
longing, with impressions like fingerprints all over.
I'm saying physical perception is the data of my embodiment, whereas for the
rose, scarlet itself is matter.
2
The rose communicates instantly with the woman by sight, collapsing its
boundaries, and the woman widens her boundaries.
Her "rate of perception" slows down, because of its complexity.
There's a feeling of touching and being touched, the shadings of color she can sense
from touch.
There's an affinity between awareness and blossom.
The rose symbolizes the light of this self-affinity.
I come to visit drooping white cabbage roses at dusk.
That corner of the garden glows with a quality of light I might see when light
shines through mist or in early morning reflects off water.
I stand quietly and allow this quality to permeate air around me.
Here, with a white rose, color is clairsentient, this color in the process of being
expressed, like seeing Venus in the day.
Walking, I move in and out of negative space around which each rose is engaged
and become uncertain of my physical extent as an object.
Look at the energy between people and plants; your heart moves into depth
perception; for depth, read speed of light.
I set my intention through this sense of moving into coherence with the bio-photons
of a plant and generate feeling in response.
A space opens and awareness gathers it in, as at night my dream is colorless and
weaves into the nuance.
I can intentionally engage with the coherence of light beams, instant as though
lightless, or the colored light of a dimension not yet arrived, as our hearts are not
outside affinity with respect to wavelength, shaping meaning, using the capacity
for feeling to sense its potency in a rose and to cultivate inter-being with summer
perfume.
Permanent Home
By Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
1
I seek a permanent home, but this structure has an appearance of indifferent compoundedness and isolation, heading toward hopelessness.
The boy pulls an animal on a leash.
The house with a red roof rests between two hills.
I can look through its windows to the sea.
His aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation?
House is the projection, space around it intermediary, theater.
You don’t have to consume the space to exist, distance, point-to-point, in which a beloved ruin is middle ground, for example.
2
First house and space negate one another.
Then, they’re a series.
The boy watches a mouse run around the rim of a lampshade.
He relates wanting to catch a mouse with the room, ground.
Wanting a master image obscures ground, like objects in space.
House and space are composite, like my dream, a bubble, lightning, starting point and any second place.
3
Rain pours out a gutter onto the poor horse.
Horse runs under a tin roof supported by poles.
Stockpiles of beams, salvaged wood, brick melt into contextless waste.
I understand the situation by perceiving parts, one after another, then reversing in a glance that removes time.
So, I can intuit contextless waste as ground.
4
The water tank sits on a frame of used wood, like a packing crate.
I look through it to an extinct volcano.
The panorama is true figuratively as space, and literally in a glass wall, where clouds appear like flowers, and the back-lit silhouette of a horse passes by.
A file of evergreens secures the cliff amid debris from a crew bilding, as at the edge of the sea.
Oranges, dumplings, boiled eggs take on the opaque energy of a stranger.
Knowledge as lintel, bond beam (model signs) holds the world at a distance.
A master image like bone condenses from the indistinct point-to-point feeling of self with which construction began.
My house returns from outside, as if my spirit had been blocking my path, when I wasn’t going anywhere in particular.
5
Materials and freedom combine, so materials aren’t subjective.
The material of space is like having a skeleton to gain a vantage point on seamless distance, as in a comparison.
It’s a style of accumulating materials that does not become a solid thing, anymore.
Accommodating a view by being able to be seen through is perceptual, not abstract, like space painted white.
Give a house the form of an event.
Relate it to something there, a form of compassion.
Your point of view is: it’s solid already, so there’s warmth.
In this primitive situation, pure form translates a former empire of space as wilderness.
Chinese space breaks free from the view in front of me, while my house continues to rotate on earth.
A Placebo
By Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
1
We call change in a person the effect of time, witness my new dress, so short,
with buttons on the yoke shaped like swans.
I enter from the back of the room, pausing at the hopeful energy of people
gathered to see me.
They are a surface, alive and redolent, half unseen, like iridescent cloth.
I sense structure spontaneously form, as when crossing the room to greet you,
what I say forms.
And I worry that spontaneity acts for its own reasons, not mine.
My dress is a visual image of unconscious affirmative processes, the way spontaneity
expresses its order, as I create a world, stocking it with small dogs on the runway,
handbags, a bouillonne of rose tulle at the waist of a jacket.
So, I'm not limited to what I observe, rather than feel.
2
They assess quite accurately my choice of babydoll dress as value for others.
Each absorbs encouragement from her assessment, even though every being's
imprinted with data to create every appearance.
Seeing a leaf may reveal knowledge that communicates instantly among
microbes, which can change in a wink.
So, the optimistic idea would be the most biologically pertinent one.
I dress to express a hoped for solution.
Rachel's blouse, for example, is not purple just for photographers' enjoyment.
Flowers are intrinsic to her feeling for her value, she seeks by expression to extend.
Each guest creates her own sumptuous panoply from my honey sable coat over
silvery pajamas, new, vintage, because of simultaneous time, therefore matter.
So, physical change is not time, as such.
3
I feel love from the fashion community as light from photographs of others' bodies
as light from their scrutiny of my photograph in a dress bold enough to sustain
the penetration of disembodied light of my entrance.
To audience, unnamed cutters, sewers, embroiderers, beaders I attribute this beauty,
when meaning i.e., style, is given a sympathetic presence.
Mirroring touches it, like exquisite jet beads on a gray coatdress in almost
transparent bouclé, clusters of dark stones on the shoulder.
A loose blouse in cream silk crepe is tied at the sleeves with glistening cellophane
ribbons.
You feel I understand your own contingency plans.
Do you remember my show in London, when all the models were drunk, broken
glass everywhere?
Fashion does that, giving shape and color to our inarticulate impulses.
I present the contemporary as liminal, transitions, transparencies.
You nurture the uncontained confusion, when no permeable resonance has yet
formed.
The gray is cloudy, deep, but without melancholy.
4
Before dinner, we're asked to sign the guestbook on a Boulle console in the hall.
People I've seen in magazines seem very tall, their features enlarged from being
photographed.
Each appearance has a materiality more significant than we usually expect from
bodies.
Style, soul, is power through which matter is formed.
Like historic change, a body can re-materialize in its chrysalis, when the life you
know is left behind.
You're alone in a white brocade jacket with fur trim and frosting white cloque, a
skirt of stiff flounces, like quartz crystals flecked with gold.
In this chrysalis, you now change the contemporary, viewing the past in
extending light that's mobile around your body.
My dress is not stuck in time like a butterfly born in a jar, whose wings are
therefore useless.
5
In the dining room, with Ming wallpaper restored by young Chinese artists, Kiki
wears a blue silk coat embroidered with gold.
I mention Louise's white helmet, Camilla on pewter platforms flashing to gold,
light on water, what we mean visually by souls for whom the the body is potential,
futural.
In my closet, there's no distinction between material and the intelligible.
When I continue to dress after I tell him my dog has died, he begins to weep.
He asks how I can waste this evening chattering?
I say through tears I mourn my little dog, but that means little to him, because of
my outfit.
He makes a mistake in reading, like a wrong accessory, inserting an extra vowel
or syllable and changing the whole passage, though I don't usually wear sheer
stockings with that dress.
It was a case of spontaneity, a transparent white warp like an open window
through which a moment is perceived, unshaded by the physical.
And in fact, many in the room were not in good health.
Through this window, I take in a non-causative molecule to change myself, what
a mother administers, placebo, the intent of a dress.
When you wear it for the first time, you're surprised by a rush of feeling for
