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.