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Vulnerability of Order Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems _______ Email ______________
Martine Bellen
For the Living: A Chapbook
Draped Mirror
This written by a fertilized cell trying to understand
Chrysalis of a monarch butterfly.
Plane-beings in an invented world
Tricks up her sleeve or tracks
Nodding out in the spirit field
The one moment there's no field, fear, or force.
A room of false dragonheads, devil's paintbrush
Will vanish with her
Vanish her.
On her air-borne wall
Is taped a poster of her planet
On her poster a speculum.
Ingredients: blood, oceans, nightmares
Or the periodic table set for Macbeth's banquet.
Hydraulics propel sleepwalkers
Who want for elemental sustenance
Bony architecture of a house made from bodily sounds,
The canal that collects charnel flesh-dreams.
For the Living
If body is an impermanent manifestation of infinite spirit
Can anyone deny space is haunted?
If love is an expression that death
Seduces hardens
Ghost lover,
You have been gone
For some time now.
At first I didn't notice.
Like a ghost, love slipped out, like sex, your ghost limb
You say you love me, I feel you
In abstentia.
To ghost means take passage on a ship. Without
Meaning the world is hollow
Parallel word in which he is husband / servant / enemy / father
Why therapy exists
And one cannot be separate from another
Without disturbing a complex
Entanglement
To pray is to break silence, break bread.
To pray is to partake
In the dead
What's not fluid?
The mind, wind, wants
Stability, to understand
Has no coordinates
Quantum entanglement their fates inextricably linked
Multiple answers detained through superposition or multiverse
She had the chance to love a man but chose a ghost.
He will make me happy, she told her friends. He touches a part of me
that's dead.
More of her became dead the longer they loved.
As a haunted human she moved away from certainty,
Moved toward what she wanted
To be certain. Ha! Ha!
The probability of finding a lover at a point in space
Until found the lover exists as possibility therefore always exists
Lost
Potential
A web of relationships and interrelationships
Bound by boundaries of body
If the space we inhabit is shared by all spirit
Unlimited realm
Circuit
Frequency
Unrelenting
Our bodies containers we pour out
Slowly until we've left
To choose the extent of ourselves
Distance that separates one event from another. Soul.
Like the sun eight minutes in the past. How close is that in space?
Solar. Look at Saturn! Has it passed your past? Or Pluto?
More moons. More. More.
Fear she's not loved, therefore value neutral
As though love were the sun. Blinding.
Must not look directly. Like God / Truth
When / where space-time curves nothing can escape it.
It captures me and I become it, therefore cannot see it.
No communication signal breaks free
Do you know loneliness?
Fata Morgana
1.
She removes herself from the rational realm of feelings
Flooded by a prevailing intelligence
Where she hides for longer than a mood
That which is “in the air”
A surround environment, not all of her own making.
She constructs its interpretation and moves inward. Sound
Outside boundaries
For instance, architectural surrounds built with language—doors, walls,
Floors from words. Would she open the window? double paned,
Unusually weighty. A vowel she looks through to see changes
In weather, to see outside the confines of her scape.
When the surround she understood encountered the surround that was.
Plate disturbance traumatizes earth. Bends her, morphs her
Bedrock
2.
Two-thirds of life she's unconscious
A quest through privacy of land not created.
Splinter souls—sinuosities or organic forms flattened to fill shadow space,
The body's music:
Awakens for her dream, sleeps off continuity
But for the sake of survival she believes what appears to be
A one-point perspective system
In which recessional lines join where they vanish
Creating distortions, objects skew.
When the assumption of a system is altered, the space it describes
Changes in unforeseen ways.
Horizontals and verticals support the couple's stability and beliefs in
realism
Vanish
To scale a domestic scene
She sees her point vanishing while what surrounds her
Increases size, clarity of focus.
Within her flat canvas exists immeasurable depth,
Uncountable colors, interminable death,
To satisfy her need for proof.
If she believes nothing
Vacant imagination acts as symptom.
3.
She produces information, an energy system, that creates
The circumstances of her surround.
Since in the surround only present exists
Impressions made on space erase backward leaving no record,
Personal memory. Even love itself is not there,
Or when it was found,
A cessation of action would have occurred. Her whole life
So afraid of loving her way, losing her way that she ends up nowhere
Where
Everyone wraps—Internal apperception.
The past or space she calls herself,
How she perceives
Her body surrounded by her room. When she consumes
Her interior, a visitation contacts her,
A whisper parks in the inner ear or a metallic disc soars
Into a whisper park, dense forest and future empty. Afterimage or glow
Remains isolated or invisible to the present, which is what she can
retain.
4.
Without an intact surround, ego apertures leak
Into haunts where shame fumes
And legs, act as a portal, walk her toward entrancing
Reflections, unoccupiable land, foreign, deserted.
Even mullioned moon abandons
Because love causes descent into death and, yes, belief
Impossible to sustain
Without her surround.
Fever
Crisis of refuge and interior design
Mind as mirror that draws her
Into the struggle to maintain lucidity
If candlelight can't be trusted to clarify true color
Shame & talk of windcraft sweeping the cadaver she wore
Procures a wing for fight
Over skeleton forest
Astray / astral
No rest there!
Awaiting wrap up—or wake up
Morning's the nightmare
Eyes open to
A dipper of clear water
A milky dipper of stars on a standing night in which ravens revel.
*
Sleepers dim with dreams tripping off
Her disregard for erections
And wildwood marrow
Memory's chutes and ladders
Last ghost before Candyland
Sonatas for spiders.
Words worry meaning in the space of shape
Scalloped teacup space
Shy space / sky space
Black hole
Cyberspace
Heart's a rumor: A cut-stone space too inside
Like wild flora beds, a living reshape
A bellybutton,
Clairvoyant murmur,
Presiding genius not dependent
On light and lens, nor eye.
*
Her thoughts
Leave no track
Could be lexis or melody
Ashes drift,
She drifts,
Thick weather midpassage
Inspiriting forests and fresh fox burrows
Shrilly cricket
Sounds fasten us to stars
Thought lit and purling, measured and lithe as music
A high cord vibrating the sea
A cord traveling high with sun's light
The higher if minor exploits of sound.
*
Safe place: abstract, dark, free from nature's rules
But only in sleep
System of meaning
As if you express a sound losing its body
A body as a point traveling a rectangle
Integrated in the formula for measuring love
The movement the heart makes as it yields to death
Straight line or unbroken hum
A line allowing vibration
To reorder its appearance in time.
—For Ann Lauterbach
Ms. Bellen's poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies including This Art: Poems About Poetry, Copper Canyon Press (2003) and The Convergence of Birds: Writing Inspired by Joseph Cornell, DAP (2001). She has been a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the American Academy of Poets Award. She is a contributing editor and on the board of directors of Web del Sol (webdelsol.com). Ms. Bellen teaches at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and Rutgers University.
