Vox Populi
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Alice Friman: The Apricot Tree
Kyparassia, Greece, 1977
I’m walking the white-washed steps
winding the hills into town. The odor—
wild thyme and spearmint. And halfway, look,
an apricot tree ablaze with summer, heavy
with fruit. There is a man, of course, green-
eyed Alekos of the red truck, a yaya leading
a donkey, a girlchild, Roola, who hangs on
my neck, begging me to stay. If the journal’s
ink that tells my story has faded, I’ve held it
safe in my head, as if in amber. Only the tree
has grown bigger, bursting its casing—a tree
of nectar and ambrosia where housewives
come to fill their aprons, enough for everybody.
Not like Eden’s tree or Stevens’ palm at the end
of the mind, aloof, beyond us, but part of the daily
juice that is Greece, the dazzle and the dance.
Where’s the file drawer in my brain that holds
the memory of that tree? Behind which eyelid?
Sometimes when I’m tired, I see double. Oh, how
I wish I could conjure duplicates in my dreams
to take me back to those white steps where that tree
stood, double-dropping its sloppy sweetness all over
the ground for the women to come and gather up
in their aprons, take home and make jelly.
Copyright 2023 Alice Friman. First published in PLUME #143, July 2023. Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.
Alice Friman’s many books include On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems (LSU, 2024). She lives in Georgia.
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This reads like an ode, not just to apricots and Greece, but to memory itself ❤️
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What a lovely memory to be shared!
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Love this sweet overload to my senses. I have been eating tasteless apricots and remembering trees loaded with sweetness in my childhood.
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I’m glad to see a growing market in ancient varieties of fruit.
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Thank you for this jewel of a poem, Michael — I agree with Sean and Warren!
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I love Alice’s poems!
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Alice Friman is truly nonpareil.
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Indeed! Thanks, Warren.
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When poetry is so complete as this, the synthesis of word from phenomena—actual, imagined—so fully realized, there is nothing to do but take it in like a lovely meal and rejoice for having been invited to such a place and exquisitely fed. She is our true Goddess of poetry in the flesh.
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Nice paean, Sean. Alice makes it look easy to write a great poem.
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