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.