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    The poem confessed
    it has no sense
    of direction,
    a born zigzagger,
    topographically agnostic.
    It admitted to losing
    its Timex, its Tampex,
    its compass,
    its password
    for an ancient, agéd
    voice app. The poem confessed
    to requesting training
    on training
    its gaze
    on a subject, to needing
    a hearing aid
    and Coke bottle glasses.

    Who seeks an old poem?
    A poem
    long in the tooth
    losing
    its words?

    Who seeks a poem
    that forgets?

    The poem
    placed a post
    in the help
    wanted section
    of the virtual paper,
    traveled cyberspace,
    psyche-space,
    collective unconscious
    space, the white
    page space
    of poems.
    It hovered on air
    waves with video off,
    audio mute. The poem
    visited prisons and crossbow
    competitions, barrios,
    barges, and botanical gardens
    invisible to sensors and senses.
    The poem pit-stopped
    at the Louvre
    and penetrated the private
    marble space
    of Psyche Revived
    by Cupid’s Kiss
    .

    Hear me,
    the poem cried
    to the beholders,
    attempting to awaken
    their hearts,
    to quicken
    their breath,
    appealing to priestesses,
    to congregating soothsayers,
    mobs and rabble
    circling the statue,
    unhearing the poem,
    the disheartened poem,
    the hardening poem.

    The poem conceded
    to being enervated,
    phlegmatic. The poem
    congealed.

    Inside the statue
    the poem presaged
    Cupid
    as an unwrought
    stone before Canova
    spit on him,
    softened him,
    took a blade
    and hammer
    to him,
    used his childhood
    strength
    to fight him,
    flatten him,
    fly him.
    And as is the way
    of stone,
    memories
    haunt it,
    meld into it,
    melt it. The sea
    and air
    fashion it.
    It’s the flame too.
    The sculpture’s block
    is stone, and
    the poet’s block
    is prayer.

    Inside
    the stone,
    the poem
    is proffered
    a jelly jar,
    told the poem’s
    waning gifts
    await in amniotic
    fluid, hypnotic
    fluid,
    though only an oracle
    may unseal
    the jar
    which contains
    the teeth of the poem
    that abide in Nyx.
    Repress your curiosity,
    link and sync yourself
    to me
    , the sane, balanced
    spirit sang to the poem.

    See
    the floundering
    silent
    filmy poem,
    without limn or limit,
    a ragged, invisible,
    unvarnished thing.
    Repress
    your curiosity,
    antediluvian poem,
    we need
    a victim now
    , a choral
    reprise of sane,
    shaming
    spirits chimed.

    Ain’t that the truth at all times,
    given nothing
    around me is mine
    ,
    the poem says
    as it looks
    at the marble
    statue
    with a mask on.







    The poem
    comes
    loose
    like a tooth

    Like star blisters
    scratched
    till light
    pus oozes

    Poems can be seen
    so much better
    in the dark, can seem
    better in the dark

    Can see, like cats, in the dark

    No one is alone
    in the cat
    in the dark
    in the poem
    in the palace
    with its storehouse
    of candelabras
    and crystal vases,
    giant tigresses
    romping through
    narrow
    atriums
    into the ventricle of the heart

    Search and rescue
    this life of ours riddled with delusion
    with tried light
    tired light

    We fall in order
    to love
    each other

    The protolanguage that permits our stone tongues

    The prodigal

    Kiss

     

    Martine Bellen is the author of This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015), WABAC Machine (Furniture Press Books, 2013), and The Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon Press, 2001), among other collections. Moon in the Mirror, an opera on which she collaborated, was performed this year at Cleveland State University.

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