Weekly Feature: Poetry at The Arts Fuse
Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday
To Think Snow: A Meditation
1
August in Montauk. Not a time to think
of white-capped crests, Snowy Egrets
or the arctic vortex.
2
No one says “snow” now.
3
Summer passes swiftly by. Don’t think
of snow.
4
An inhaling whale of a cloud scarfs down my dream
of snow, though sarong (not scarf) is our weather wrap.
5
Moon rises and white lights squall
like breath’s ebb and snow.
Winter mind disregards frosty cones
and still I’m thinking
I know.
6
No one listens
for snow in summer,
though I snow
each word that melts
in my glacial ponderings.
7
Mental slips of sand
elide into dunes of snow
from wind-blown
drifts on the bare back
of a hot August beach.
Martine Bellen is the author of ten books, most recently, An Anatomy of Curiosity (MadHat Press, 2023), 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 appeared in The Best American Poetry, 2023, edited by Elaine Equi. As a librettist, Bellen has collaborated with David Rosenboom on AH! Opera No-Opera, which world premiered at REDCAT in L.A. Additionally, she cowrote Moon in the Mirror (composer: Stephen Dembski) with Zhang Er, which was performed at Flushing Town Hall, California State University in L.A., Cleveland State University, and the Blue Building in New York City. 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. She is an independent book editor and teaches at Wesleyan University.
Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.
— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx