Martine Bellen
BRIAR ROSE
For Robert Coover
In the Briar
She elides into a slender
slumber
The thicket
sweetest part
privet hair hedge
Seeping beauty,
sleeping one hundred
sultry summers
Whose spine opens onto
lines of shiny poem stones
Songs skip across ocean
following the leader’s voice home
Though to accomplish
this near impossible quest
one must accept
no victuals, no kiss,
nor boons of any kind.
(Absolutely and relatively impossible!)
We believe in the girl
who will fail
in love
with enchained sleep,
the enchanted beauty
who will fall
in love with
the charms of death,
“Sleep” with seductive
Desire, whose howling
willingly tears us
to shreds,
blows home
a part of forest
destroyed by heat.
Wildflower sleeps,
wildfire leaps.
Turning the Page
The night is a page, a prince,
a pouncing cat, mouse of the house.
We turn and
Rose enters
night attired
and entangled
in textile briars,
braille text
that pricks
her thick-thorned
readers.
A spell casts
sleep upon her brow.
Some call it “love,” a lulling
soporific. She knows it’s
wrong to let him in
her dreams where she can’t run
or call out, can’t save herself
And, yet, each night,
eyes tucked in
beneath compressed time
and with Jiminy Cricket’s conscience,
she views the show through a peephole
in the heart of death’s door,
while a water-well away, her sister
Gretel, turns to stone, to salt, to spiders,
to sweets for suckling, as Rose sinks
deeper in the torpor of her nocturnal lord.
Penultimate Act
Finally, falling through the lightless channel, Rose awakens,
opens each iris, clumps of dreads on a charnel pallet. The Coover
storybook—spine broken, rests upon her breasts—speaks of a
beauty who’s been raped by gangs of married princes, a bevy of
bland daughters born and dead. Dead. All dead. Case closed on
the tale. Rose bestirs to infer she has missed much of life,
shadows folded up and shrink wrapped, shades hawking second-
hand selves, some who will have moved on to populate the
peripheries of the storied lives of strangers. What dreams might
she had pursued as she slept those hundred years? Tangoing so
many moments away, tangled in mind-made briars, angling on a
voluminous ocean bed: the birth of winsome Venus on a Half
Shell, bashful Michelangelo’s David catching the eyes of
Vermeer’s girl with a pearl, beauties who dared not sleep and
would not fade, not lonely, blanched bones in a pine forest field
of boxes, not Miss Haversham’s moldy wedding cake.
PALINOPSIA
You are looking at leaves through a window.
Though the window has color, we call it colorless.
The way a loved one—who has passed away—
colors how we view those who the loved one loved.
As though when they left, they left
a pane of glass around their loved ones. As though the tint
of the one who has passed away has pressed
onto another’s light, another’s life.
A loved one who is no longer with us
can recede through a window.
Now they are on a bus. We are beside them.
We are beside ourselves as we think of them
passing into a sequestered world
that we can visit only through dream,
which is another window.
We believe we are seeing
a new color in a dream that lays
between us, which is always there
whether we look through the window, or not,
whether we knock around our contiguous
worlds, or not, whether we knock into them,
whether they knock us down, and we answer
that knock on a window we cannot see.
Like how we say a loved one passes
when we see the light,
their life, leave their eyes, like
how they promised to refuse
to walk into that light, like when the Northern
Lights appear in the sky through the lens
of a camera, that plasma membrane
between what we see and believe
we see, such as flashing sky motes for stars, satellites,
magnetic charge. Though they could be cracks
in space and time in which our loved one enters,
though they could be holes into God’s heart
from which our loved one may speak to us,
though they could be airplanes
carrying hundreds of souls overseas.
We might be flying on one such plane,
looking at the back of the seat in front
of us, the face of our future in a palm-sized
movie screen where we play parts
we’re still learning. We might be an understudy.
We might be attempting to understand our new place on a new plane.
We might be under the weather,
an atmospheric disturbance, a distortion
we have recently been perceiving,
a distance we have been sensing, as though
you are looking through a glass window, as though you are the glass
or posing for a picture before the Northern Lights.
As though you are the light of true north, which is perceived
Day-Glo green through the camera’s lens,
though you are in bed waving good night to a loved one
who has left you behind a glass window,
standing beside a bus that is leaving the terminal.
Your loved one might be receding, or you might be receding,
the deep past beside you, a reflection of a life
through the lens of a camera, an eye’s
afterimage, a memory of your loved one
behind a window, looking at branches and leaves.
Martine Bellen is the author of ten books, most recently, An Anatomy of Curiosity (MadHat Press, 2023) and additionally, 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 Press), which won the National Poetry Series Award. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, 2023, edited by Elaine Equi and Poetry Is Bread, edited by Tina Cane (Nirala Publications, 2025) as well as other anthologies. Bellen has been a recipient of the Queens Art Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the American Academy of Poets Award and has received a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy. For more about Bellen, visit https://www.martinebellen.com
