Poetry: M. Brooke Wiese

She picked out a nice dry Cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood at the back of the Cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail down, across the opening of the Cave; and she said, “Wipe your feet, dear, when you come in, and now we’ll keep house.”
― Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories

My mother tells me I am beautiful.
But she is the beautiful one, a goddess –
really. Because of her the crops are plentiful;
the farmers love her and she has a fondness

for them. They call her “Corn-Mother.”
I call her “Corn-Mother” too, in jest.
My father is Corn-Mother’s brother,
Zeus, and he is rarely at home. It’s best

that way, my mother says, and I can see
her point. I know he loves me but he’s difficult,
especially around her sacred mysteries
for women only – which he calls a cult.

My mother loves me fiercely… More than life,
she says. Her arms, like tendrils, wrap me up;
sometimes it’s just too much. Get a life,
I think. If only someone would abduct

me, take me far away from her,
here, I mean. I’m ready for a grand
adventure with a young and handsome lover
who will take me with him underground.

(This poem was originally published in: The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Summer 2023, Vol.17, Issue 2)

A bullfrog harrumphs somewhere in the tall
grass along the edge of the reservoir.
A cormorant is fishing for his midday
meal; he stays under a long time

looking for plunder. When he pops up,
unsuccessful, he shrugs it off – a flash
of feet and he’s gone again. His wet feathers
iridesce in the sunlight like an abalone shell.

Up on a corner of North Pump House,
a mated pair of sleek cormorants puff
their chests and spread their wings to dry,
facing into the sun. The day is hazy,

the air is thick from the fires out West,
burning up the land from the Pacific
to the Mississippi. The birds flutter
their throats against the heat, a neat

trick to cool off in this man-made sauna,
a strategy never needed this far
north before, but we are in another
war, this time with the avifauna.

Last night, the moon rose luminous
above the reservoir, the color of
tangerines, a photo-op for social
media, unsettling all the same. Relief

is promised today, when sudden thunderstorms
will unleash monsoon rains, giant hail,
and wind shear strong enough to blow a house
down, and clear away the smoky air.

(This poem was originally published in: Sparks of Calliope, September 12, 2022)

In galleries reminders of death abound
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
filled with paintings of a stick-like man crowned
with thorns, beneath a sword and fiery heart,

lying limp across his mother’s lap.
And on the wall in another hall
are paintings of fruit – luscious, lush, ripe –
with a mallard duck and a hare, and an oyster shell

on the table in front of the bowl of fruit. The hare’s
fur so life-like you want to touch it, wonder if you can,
but the shell is empty, nothing there,
and the rabbit and duck are as limp as the languid man.

Look closely at the deep purple plum
that’s past its prime. Note the alabaster worm.

(This poem was originally published in: The Orchards Poetry Journal, Winter 2024)

August nights, and the black tarpaper roof
still holds the day’s sun. Our tangled limbs,
the air finally cooling, the pigeon coop
quiet now, pigeons cooing pigeon hymns

softly. In the morning they will fly
aloft in a gyre before coming back
to settle on the rooftop. White, grey,
brown, black, mottled, they react

to something we can’t see – a dragonfly,
feathers ruffled by a light breeze,
a red-tailed hawk circling. We lie
beneath the water tower in our memories.

Sunrise: looking down the avenue, a lesson
in perspective, the moon a fading crescent.

(This poem was originally published in: Love Poems, an anthology of Bronze Bird Books, August 2024)

Out of the rumbling ground and into the bright
August light, into the city scrum,
the gum-covered sidewalks, the human bloom,
the lack of air and elbow room, the blight
in streets where rats and pigeons fight
for crumbs or top-dog status, the scaffolding a boon
only in a storm. Out of the shout and out of the din,
the waiting room is almost too polite.

Heavy curtains drawn against the daylight
mute the voices in the waiting room
to a soft ssh-ssh, like a broom
sweeping. The carpet’s pattern is infinite;
the low pile guaranteed to accommodate
a cane or walker. The walls are pale as the moon.
The unassuming art is laudanum
for the sick, unobjectionable as life.

You might expect a moan from those with no
hope left, or those alone and lonely. Instead
you’ll find a convivial place where people nod
and smile in passing, yet keep contained as though
a broad gesture or loud guffaw might offend;
and all are patient, and no one finds it odd.

There’s coffee too, and tea (for free!) and no
lack of crackers to nibble by patients with hatted heads
for stomachs distressed by the fusillade
of poisons shot into a vein, a salvo
against the spread of errant cells, the Red
Devil entrenched in a battle to the death with God.

(This poem was originally published in: Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Pulsebeat 08, May 2024)

    for my mother

The nurse thumbs the wheel that opens the tube
that releases that exquisite lube

that bathes the sere and crumbling hummocks of your brain
and flushes out the tatters of your pain.

As you soak up that magical juice
your sinews, skin and links get loose

and you forget, first me, and then your cat
and you’re no longer sitting there where you sat.

With Lethe’s sweet water in your veins
you depopulate – college roommates, names

of childhood friends, an illicit lover,
teachers, bosses, my father, and last, your own mother,

all emptying into the vortex oblivion.
Irresistible. Final. Elysium.

(This poem was originally published in: The Chained Muse, September 26, 2023)

   (a.k.a. Point Nemo, the furthest location from dry land in any direction)

This is the name of the gatehouse
to the vast ocean’s unbounded most,
nothing but water and water and air –
this is the middle of nowhere.

This is the longest swim, where even the strongest
limb, if not a fin, can’t reach the closest
point of land, 1700 miles from anywhere near,
here in the middle of nowhere.

51,000 laps to the nearest landing,
one million, three hundred twenty-six thousand strokes
in the ocean’s throat, with not a rock poking up,
nor even a boat or a coconut floating

anywhere near in this most vast.
This is an unwinnable test in the ocean’s gaping mouth
where, despite your orange vest you are alone, depressed,
and mired at this remote pole in the South Pacific Gyre

where no one can assist you as you
expire here in the middle of nowhere,
in this uncoast, treading water as you tire,
where soon you’ll no longer exist in this vast most.

(This poem was originally published in: Poets for Science, November 19, 2024)

At 2:10 this afternoon, three
dolphins swam upriver from the Lower
Bay through The Narrows, to the Upper
Bay, past piers awash in plastic bottles and debris,
past ferries and yachts and the city’s grandees
in their living rooms overlooking the river
where the setting sun shone like melted butter
on three dorsal fins bound for Albany.

Perhaps they were tailing the humpback whale
seen breaching off The Heights a week ago
in the briny tidal estuary, Mahicantuck –
The River That Flows Two Ways; the sailors’ grail;
the first Trail of Tears. Perhaps they’ll follow
northward to the river’s source before heading back.

(This poem was originally published in: The Sonnet Scroll of The Poetry Porch, April 2024)