The Constellation Quilt

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (Chinese: Bái Xuānhuá; born October 5, 1947 Beijing, China) is a contemporary poet. Winner of two American Book Awards, her work is often associated with the Language School, the poetry of the New York School, phenomenology, and visual art. She is married to the painter Richard Tuttle, with whom she has frequently collaborated.

The Constellation Quilt

She stitched her story on black

silk patches from the mourning dress, quaint

as our novels will seem, but we still recognize

tonight’s sky, as if there were a pattern

whose edges compose with distance, like nebulae

or namings, so triangles become Orion

Horse, Morning Star, not flanks and wings imagined

in gases, or story pieced out of intervals

from which any might grow, as if sparks ever

scatter the same, or a name assume one face

and stance, dated in cross-stitch in a corner

Stitching a name like defoliate in white thread

on white fabric leaves the leaf empty. In that

century, it was a giraffe or a bear’s act. Sometimes

the only pattern seems shock waves advancing

in parallel fanned lines, leaving a tide’s debris

whose pattern is moon, cryptic as if there were none

the one safe assumption. Littlest sisters eclipsed

are each another story of a marriage, using the same

scraps for different constellations, Bear, Swan

overlapping.

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