Draped MirrorThis written by a fertilized cell trying to understandChrysalis 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 planetOn 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 LivingIf body is an impermanent manifestation of infinite spiritCan 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 limbYou say you love me, I feel youIn abstentia.  To ghost means take passage on a ship. Without Meaning the world is hollowParallel word in which he is husband / servant / enemy / fatherWhy therapy existsAnd one cannot be separate from another Without disturbing a complexEntanglement To pray is to break silence, break bread.To pray is to partake In the deadWhat's not fluid? The mind, wind, wants Stability, to understandHas no coordinatesQuantum entanglement their fates inextricably linkedMultiple answers detained through superposition or multiverseShe 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 wantedTo be certain. Ha! Ha!The probability of finding a lover at a point in space Until found the lover exists as possibility therefore always existsLostPotentialA web of relationships and interrelationships Bound by boundaries of bodyIf the space we inhabit is shared by all spiritUnlimited realm		    Circuit			    FrequencyUnrelentingOur bodies containers we pour outSlowly until we've leftTo choose the extent of ourselvesDistance 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 neutralAs though love were the sun.  Blinding. Must not look directly. Like God / TruthWhen / 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 Morgana1.She removes herself from the rational realm of feelingsFlooded by a prevailing intelligence Where she hides for longer than a moodThat which is “in the air” A surround environment, not all of her own making. She constructs its interpretation and moves inward.  Sound						Outside boundariesFor 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 unconsciousA 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 continuityBut for the sake of survival she believes what appears to beA one-point perspective system In which recessional lines join where they vanishCreating 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 sceneShe 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 nothingVacant 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 consumesHer 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 glowRemains isolated or invisible to the present, which is what she can          retain.  4.Without an intact surround, ego apertures leak Into haunts where shame fumesAnd legs, act as a portal, walk her toward entrancing Reflections, unoccupiable land, foreign, deserted.Even mullioned moon abandonsBecause love causes descent into death and, yes, beliefImpossible to sustainWithout her surround.Fever		Crisis of refuge and interior design	Mind as mirror that draws herInto the struggle to maintain lucidityIf candlelight can't be trusted to clarify true colorShame & talk of windcraft sweeping the cadaver she woreProcures 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 waterA 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 laddersLast ghost before CandylandSonatas for spiders.   Words worry meaning in the space of shape            Scalloped teacup space             Shy space / sky space                   Black hole                   CyberspaceHeart'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 melodyAshes drift, 	She drifts,Thick weather midpassageInspiriting forests and fresh fox burrows			Shrilly cricketSounds fasten us to starsThought lit and purling, measured and lithe as musicA high cord vibrating the seaA cord traveling high with sun's lightThe higher if minor exploits of sound.               	            	*Safe place: abstract, dark, free from nature's rules             					But only in sleepSystem of meaningAs if you express a sound losing its bodyA 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 humA line allowing vibration     To reorder its appearance in time.		—For Ann Lauterbach		

     Martine Bellen is the author of five collections of poetry including The Vulnerability of Order, Copper Canyon Press (2001); Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems, Sun & Moon Press (1999) which won the National Poetry Series Award; and Places People Dare Not Enter, Potes & Poets Press (1991). A bilingual collection of poetry, Musée Magie, was just published in Germany by Verlag im Waldgut (translator, Hans Jürgen Balmes). She recently completed her sixth collection, Living with Animals. She has also written the libretto for Ovidiana, an opera based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (composer, Matthew Greenbaum) that has been performed in New York City and Philadelphia.
     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.