The Vulnerability of Order

Wildness and disorder. Martine Bellen's third collection of poetry taps into the chaotic and irrepressible spirit which inspires artistic expression. Whether exploiting philosophical fragments from ancient Greece or penetrating the rituals of the great world religions, Bellen is in search of a model through which artists might organize the expansiveness of the human spirit."Bellen is a sensualist with a taste for vernacular as refined as C.D. Wright's…—Bellen's giddy, insouciant renderings of our thickly mythic polis seem fresh, and appear to create their author from the tactile fragments of the text."—Publishers Weekly Martine Bellen's Tales of Murasaki won the 1999 National Poetry Series Award. She lives in New York.For the Saturday Evening Girls' Pottery ClubPlease, oh please, spread something sweet Over my shredded wheatThat rests upon this yellow plate, fired in its biscuit state.Mystic swastika hands abound, Fortune, luck, well-being found,And bowls with bands of ducks and trees, ring around the ABCs.Hand-thrown pots incised in ink; Still-soft clay initials sink.Please, today, come sip some tea with small designs, each cup's jolie,The harmony lies not in line But deeper in the object's rhyme.Magic Musee for Joseph Cornell(excerpt)She, who's overconscious of her cage Formed from heat, moisture, frost, concealment,How it drips, freezes, fogs How it forms columnar cracks gashed with glassToward the blue peninsula, gravity flight The visible half of reflectionAttempting to obtain the solidity of an objectOr to remove the clothing of sound, genealogical anxiety, Disrobing at the hotel EdenInventing a way in To that which is built over conceptPochahontas(excerpt)Too far away to be seen singly, they comeTogether. The coat-wearing People. They comeOn floating isles. Carry Thunder sticks. They lookFor back seas where clove And mulberry grow. They comeFrom beyond the gr