Four Poems by Margaret Adams Birth

 

 

TREE HOUSE

 

Like a scalene triangle,

the three longleaf

pines looked cattywampus, only more so

than you might reckon, on account of

the slope where they grew

out of a grassy rise.

 

Beneath, a thick bed of pine straw

sketched a whisky brown oval

and caught odd pebbles and twigs and cones;

anything that fell stayed stuck

there like Bible character figures

on a Sunday school felt board—

a little midden

of treasures from God’s Creation.

 

When I was yet a mite, I called it my

tree house, even though it wasn’t an elevated

platform as a proper tree house

should be; but then, not much in the world I observed was

proper (whether right proper or highfalutin prim) or

as it might should have been.

 

Using the deep pockets on dresses too mini

to look like they could hold much of anything,

I’d sneak out my dolls that I’d

already been told I was too old

to countenance playing with—Dusty and Misty

I sometimes called them, or Dawn and Eve, my idea of

the downright coolest, absolute grooviest of

peacenik hippie teens, such as I hoped to grow up to be.

 

Then, since my comprehension of coolness, grooviness,

and hippiedom only went so far, I’d play to my strengths:

I’d fashion fine china plates from plaited grass blades,

tea cups from stray white oak leaves molded to a hollow,

and hats from daisy chains I’d wind round our heads,

and imagine us wearing Lilly Pulitzer shift dresses,

               Pappagallo ballet flats, and white kid gloves.

 

Like nice Carolina girls who’d made perfect curtsies

at the coming-out ball, my doll-

friends and I would attend a deb season tea party—

the cattywampus pines suddenly transformed

into an elegant arbour on a corner of lawn,

the whisky brown pine straw midden

into an antique dining table brought outside

layered in linen and lace, and covered with platters of hors d'oeuvres.

 

Somehow, I’d’ve set my hippie fantasies aside

(after all, it had always

been about wishing for the freedom to define

myself—to me, that sounded radical),

and easily slipped into the known expectations—

good little Southern lady that I was raised to be.

TRAUMATIC AMNESIAC

 

I was myself, and

you were you, and

I knew exactly where we stood . . . until a shadow

suddenly descended—

abruptly obscured

my knowledge,

my recognition

of anyone

or anything

around me.

 

Stop!

Where am I?

Who am I?

Who are you?

 

You stare, and the intensity in

your gaze overwhelms

me until I turn

my head.

 

I study our surroundings:

a nearly full parking lot,

a tall brick box of a building and its twin

next door; in the near distance,

I think I see the outline

of a canal—or

am I only imagining

something I’m seeking to recall?

Isn’t there something I should know

about this town and a canal?

 

Are you all right?

 

I don’t know.

 

What’s happening here?

 

I have no idea. (I have nothing else either.)

 

I force myself to meet

your worried frown.

In this light, your eyes shine

blue with flecks of green—warm,

like grass reflected in the sky, not the pale cold

ice of other eyes I vaguely envision—and I believe

I can see . . . hope I can see . . . how you are so

different than he, or she, or they . . . how you will keep me

secure, even though there’s nothing I know and

you could be a stranger to me.

 

Logic tells me we must

be friends. Otherwise, why would I be here

with you? So I let you lead me

up a sidewalk,

into a building, utilitarian, institutional,

onto an elevator,

into an anonymous apartment I don’t recognize.

But maybe this is good? Uncertainty and insecurity say this is okay

because it’s nothing like what I

might remember if I felt I could let myself.

 

Whispers, whispers . . .

 

I don’t understand.

 

Voices talking around me . . .

 

I can’t begin to comprehend.

 

I still don’t know anything . . . everything.

 

Why am I not more afraid?

 

My present is unclear, my future only more so.

 

Yet, for whatever reason, I sense that I’m safe here.

 

Exhausted from trying to recall—for how long?—I rest

and eventually sleep and dream

bright, vivid carnival dreams—

not a happy, playful carnival, though,

but a nightmarish midway, with people dressed as characters

who aren’t at all what they seem, and freaks,

and mirrors that reflect falsely, reminding me

that I can never know where the truth lies

(or even whether that is pun or truth) . . .

until I open my eyes and suddenly see

 

the shadow lift, and then I understand:

the past is gone, and

everything good I need to know is

right here, right now, with you and me.

THE MEADOW OF THEIR COMMON SONG

 

They pursue freeways north along the ocean,

past brackish marshes and dusty headlands

bounding the Pacific. They’re out of formation

 

and appear disoriented, but are borne aloft

by some supernatural power, toward

a place that holds their history—

 

and behind them flies nothing but faith

and cloudless azure hue. I’d hold

the mapmakers responsible,

 

but should they fairly be blamed

for trying the re-create the landscape and the True Way,

for attempting to retouch the failures

 

that have touched their own wholly human ancestry?

It all wraps up like a Tinseltown flick;

I think you know what I mean:

 

the lost and forgotten miraculously discover one another,

swallows of a feather flocking together, and home becomes

the meadow of their common song.

HELP IN TRANSIT

 

Written in mid-April 2020, in New York City, during the COVID-19/coronavirus pandemic

 

The siren whistle hoots,

a lonely owl sound splitting through a

New York City night,

sky starless in appearance

due to street lamps and other lights

reflected from myriad structures

and, of course, the ambulance strobes;

the whistle slides up and down a soprano scale

of four or five notes, back and forth, back and forth,

at the same time as

the vehicle glides

through largely empty roads—

even the so-called emergency routes

seldom travelled during these precarious times.

 

Someone new is being taken

to an already-overfull ER;

we’ve heard the tales and

we’ve seen the film,

on the local news,

of patients on gurneys lining hospital halls

because there’s no more room to put them all;

some say that the EMTs

have been told to let the cardiac codes go, to

die at home if they can’t be revived,

and that even the sickest coronavirus-symptomatic

aren’t to be transported unless

they need to be admitted for access

to hospital machinery that can’t be supplied at home.

 

It’s 2:12, then 3:36 a.m.,

and sleep still eludes me; the echoing, almost-constant

sirens haunt with their strident tune

even when they aren’t right outside on the same

thoroughfare where we’re more used to seeing hook and ladder

trucks travel to and from their nearby firehouse,

and I’m struck by how different the types of sirens sound—

for nearly twenty years, I’ve believed I couldn’t hear

FDNY emergency vehicles without 9-11 memories

coming to the fore, and now I wonder

if I’ll ever hear ambulance sirens the same again—

without the ghostly images of friends’ family

and friends lost, and others seriously ill,

and the hollow hoot of help in transit.

Margaret Adams Birth is the author of Borderlands (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poetry has appeared in more than 50 journals including Plainsongs, Lunch Ticket, Third Wednesday, and The Pointed Circle, and is forthcoming in Medusa’s Kitchen and Your Daily Poem. Three of her poems were previously published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal on 6 September 2021. She has also published short stories and novellas (some of them written under the pen names Maggie Adams and Rhett Shepard), short nonfiction, and even a few comic books. She is a native North Carolinian who has also lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, upstate New York, southern California, a rain forest on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, and now New York City. You can find her online at https://www.facebook.com/MaggieAdamsRhettShepard.