✺

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 it,
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.

✺