Poetry: M. Brooke Wiese

“Each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.”

~ May Sarton

Demeter, Persephone

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)

Cormorants Prepare for the End Times

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)

Reminders of Death Abound

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)

New York Tenement Rooftop

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)

In the Waiting Room at a Famous Cancer Hospital

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)

Morphine

    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)

The Oceanic Point of Inaccessibility

   (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)

Dolphins in the Hudson River

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)

Early Spring, Central Park

For months bare branches beat against a gray
sky, everything so tightly wrapped.
Demeter’s revenge for Persephone’s
abduction to the Underworld, earth sapped

and fallow. It seems so simple the way things bloom –
inevitable how, after a soaking rain
followed by a day of vernal sun,
the willows’ leaves unfurl in palest green,

then burst forth like fireworks. A fecund surge
follows: forsythia’s yellow halo, hills and dells
of daffodils, magnolia, bleeding heart and spurge.
Pussy willow, buttercup, red maple, bluebells.

Demeter now keeps her daughter housebound,
implores her to stay nine months above ground.

(This poem was originally published in: Poem, November 2021, No. 126)

I Need You Like a Hole in the Head

We were lucky to get out alive
from where we hid in the trunk
of your father’s second wife’s prized

white Corvette convertible that the bank
took back later but by then we
were long gone, young and punch-drunk

with crazy love, adulting in a somewhat twee
abode full of knickknacks and tchotchkes, a rental we found
in a week-old paper between the settee

cushions in the lobby of a swank hotel with round
king beds and gold-colored spigots
that we only knew from the picture postcards we obtained

in the lobby bathroom near where profligates
sat with jiggling knees, watched by hotel personnel
while we admired the city-themed trinkets

from either side of the plexiglass carousel,
your eyes through the scratched acrylic, my deep well.

(This poem was originally published in: One Sentence Poems, Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, December 2024)

Rowing to Brazil

He drags his dented metal dinghy down
the hill from Third Avenue to First,
bumping it over gravel and potholes, sending sparks
skittering along the asphalt in the eastbound

lane of 96th Street. He tugs the fraying rope
and hauls his boat across the FDR –
barely missed by three lanes of whizzing cars –
then gives a final push down the grassy slope

and heaves it over a fence into the river.
He hops in, fumbles with the oarlocks,
sits on the center thwart, re-checks his stocks,
braces his feet on the bottom boards and skippers

his ship downriver, under the three bridges,
the power of his pull in his back and feet,
the oars’ shaaaaah-chunk a steady beat
as he leaves the City of Water, City of 800 Languages.

The current is strong in this narrow rill
and spins the skiff in the vortex like bumper cars.
He could as easily be going to Mars
as following love, rowing to Brazil.

(This poem was originally published in: Qutub Minar Review: An International Literary Magazine, April 2022)

Junkies in a Soup Kitchen

The boy is pale and thin, as if he’d wintered
in a cave, and now in spring, comes blinking
out into the sun. The girl sauntered

into his group one day, felt him twinkling
across the room, silent in his aura
like a Buddha, noble as a princeling.

She knew at once he was her karma;
convinced him she was his prescription,
better than the meds from Big Pharma

to keep him in his head. His affliction
was her forward manner; he went to bed
and dreamed of someone like her who’s addiction

was to cats or pricey shoes instead.
He fell hard for her, and when she gave
the word, they fled with everything they had

stuffed in packs on their backs. They live
on heroin, so cheap now, so easy, why
not? It makes them feel so alive.

And here they sit – in love, entwined, his thigh
thrown casually over hers, his sleeping head
against her chest, their food untouched nearby.

What wouldn’t they give for one night in a real bed.
What wouldn’t they give to not be this dead.

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

My Parents, Now Living in a Petrarchan Sonnet

I wonder where they are now, my mother
and father, who moved with my sister westward to the Pacific
with her second husband, to be there for the beatific
birth of their first great-grandchild from my sister’s daughter

and her daughter’s wife. They are squatters,
my parents, settling in, parasitic
even, taking up more than their specific
space in the cupboard. Lollygaggers and hoggers.

They are old, and white as bone china,
white as bone, dusty as hearth ash,
papery and brittle as a late-Autumn leaf
riddled with pinholes, yet dense as manna
in twin cardboard boxes, still clannish,
still stealing our love like a thief.

(This poem was originally published in: Spoon River Poetry Review (SRPR), Winter 2024)

Summer Storm

The storm was over the mainland, across
the darkened waters of the bay. The day
had been warm, sun-logged, the clouds a confection, a parfait
layered in painterly shades of white and gray

climbing so high into the sweep of blue sky
you had to dig your toes into the sand
to feel the damp and smell low tide on the strand
to come back down – mussels and bladderwrack, the stink

of kelp in mudflats lapped by wavelets. That night,
almost everyone slept, because the wonder
was that it was so quiet, so absent thunder,
few noticed when the sky was rent asunder

by light striking horizontally,
spreading out from some unseen point
equally left and right, bilaterally from the mid-point
like Black Sea fan coral, or a Tree of Life

intricately inked on a ketubah. The lightning was inside
and outside those high-domed clouds, like winking fireflies
in a jar, or when Hollywood personifies
God with dramatic cloud-lighting. The rain,

if any, came later, after everyone was asleep;
the morning was dewy. The island was spared
mostly, but thousands on the mainland, unprepared
for the floods, lost power, and some people too.

(This poem was originally published in: The Climate Change Chronicles, an anthology of Bronze Bird Books, August 2024)

Sailing to Tokelau

From Letter from Polynesia: Birth of a Nation? in The New Yorker, May 1, 2006: “…when the Lady Naomi sails to Tokelau, it’s as if the ferry to Weehawken had changed course for France.”

Now, out of sight of land we cling
to anything we can. The bowsprit plunges
under, plows a trough through rough seas and flings
us willy-nilly as the ship rolls and lunges.

It was dusk or later when we left
the pier and I was reading the paper, though
I had a hunch, and something felt off,
and there were no more lights in view.

Under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
we crashed into the sea. Past Sandy Hook
the land receded ’til it was a smudge
on the horizon, and gone when we awoke.

So much sky! That was what I noticed,
more than the ocean stretching in every direction,
and suit jackets and empty water bottles tossed everywhere.
In the wheelhouse, the captain studied celestial navigation.

That was over three weeks ago
and still no rescue. Some of the crew
seem overly cheery, and some are sick below.
Please send help if this reaches you.

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