Martine Bellen
Myth of the Bluebeard-ed Bluebird
1.
“Going up,” elevator operator chimes as he closes one gate.
“Going down,” is chanted at the far end of the elevator bank, the river bank,
banks of earth sloping
from land to sea, from water wake
to streams of sleep
from limbs to fins.
In this myth, you want nothing more
than to land in a fully stocked big-box stationery store,
but the mall is poorly lit, and portals lead to floors
of canopied woods before deforestation and paper mills.
Nymphs flaunt their good fortune on escalators to faux fountains,
satyrs squeeze into try-on rooms,
whispering oaks, in maquillage, with roots of skulls and spine.
The structure’s columns
mirrored
sartorial
wear
your countenance
bear
the ceiling
conceal the celestial, the cerulean.
2.
Belongings are what you own as well as what you yearn
to be
a part of the Joan Miró painting in your impermanent collection,
futuristic jays and their corvid cousin crow
fly between toelike trees,
cawing a pathway to the heartway, to the one way
to find your way
home
belonging is what you hear from your heart ears
longings
slip off and on
3.
Dying, in this myth, means shapeshifting. Shoplifting,
in this meme, means
exiled from one dream
belonging
to another
Dryads, in this scheme, mean
appareling a forest,
a worn overgrown gown
with bioluminescent spores
clinging to moss pleats,
belongings of terra firma
*
When Bluebeard appears like the bluebird of happiness
she yearns to escape,
clasps yarn, lined white paper, vertical suit stripes,
aims her eyes out her window:
grasps her heartline, her lifeline and waits
for weights to tie her
to Earth,
ways to un-tongue her
to set her free.
Hungry Ghost in an Udon Eatery
1.
Werewolf howls
at the awakening wolf
moon, rippling and responsive
in an eyeball-sized sea
Hirsute hungry
chewy, silky
noodle ghost
as witness, waitress, watering mouth or well,
salivating stimulus, adumbrated dreamer
If hungry ghost is not hirsute mountain man
in the empty sky
with an empty stomach grumbling over
the aroma of dashi bone-broth ocean
and the udon chef breath of the cook for constellations
—Sirius in Canis Major
with no appestat / the starving
seven sisters of Pleiades—
not the witches of burning forests
and weeping bears and a teeny barred owl
2.
Traversing the universe
as a fable of this Mind,
our udon shake-shack Mind
There’s an arachnid crafting us dinner.
We are the shellfish, the meat fat, the wolf look
of the bone soup seeing the hungry diner.
Is the diner eating the deer or the deer eating dinner?
Hungry ghost ear is hearing the cook
avoiding an uncomfortable conversation
by slipping out of language
off the tongue
of spitting waves
into primordial soupy matter,
drained sand from dilating
tidal force currents,
devoured by ferocious
nocturnal devotion.
An Anatomy of Curiosity is Martine Bellen's forthcoming collection with MadHat Press, due out in the fall. Her other poetry collections include This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil), The Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon Press), and Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems (Sun & Moon), which was a winner of the National Poetry Series. Along with the poet Zhang Er, Bellen wrote the text for the opera Moon in the Mirror, composer Stephen Dembski, which has been performed at Flushing Town Hall in Queens, University of California, Los Angeles, Cleveland State University, Blue Gallery in New York City, and a new performance is being planned in New York City for September. Bellen is a recipient of the City Artist Corps Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Queens Arts Fund Grant, and has received a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy. She’s a contributing editor for Conjunctions and a middle school teacher. Her website is martinebellen.com.