Vox Populi
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Alice Friman: The Road Not Taken
after Robert Frost
I stood at the window
leaning my head, there
where the glass was cool
and looked out at the trees
bare now in January
and saw how they stand,
naked and shy as girls
on the tender cusp of
puberty, their whole lives
before them ready to begin
with no wind to disturb
or dead leaves hanging on
like memory, and I knew
tonight in my narrow bed
I’d think of them and stare
into the dark, lost in a life
that never was, for I’d taken
the road more traveled by
when all overhead trembled
in blossom, it being May,
and I so young and foolish
it never occurred to me to
find or—figure out, or—if
I had to—fight my way back.
First published in Northwest Review, Fall 2022, vol 52, no. 1.
Alice Friman’s many books include On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems (LSU, 2024). She lives in Georgia.
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I love this feisty poem on a chilly January morning in Georgia at a time when we have to figure out how to “fight [our] way back.”
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I do too, Marty. Thanks.
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This is a neat poem about the dilemma we all face. And there is no road back. Tightly packed, multifaceted, a whole life world in a few lines. Still thoughtful.
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the poem turns Frost’s poem on its head. Instead of the man who follows his own path, this poem describes a woman who followed the path laid down by others.
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“their whole lives
before them ready to begin
with no wind to disturb
or dead leaves hanging on
like memory,”
That image. What a fine poem!
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A well-crafted poem about regret.
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This thoughtful, (and in some ways enigmatic) poem just compelled me to read Frost’s poem again. Ms. Friman’s riff on it is like a jazz takeoff on the original theme. Well played.
I’ve read the first Road Not Taken numerous times over the decades, and each time then think about roads not taken in my own life. Doing so is like a parlor game with a dollop of regret for the winner.
But today, as this is the New Year’s Day poem of Vox Populi, it got me thinking about the forks in the road to come in 2025.
Starting with New Year’s resolutions, but also how will we pay attention to the forkings to come? One that keeps diverging in my own mind, is whether to keep speeding down the “Information Superhighway,” or turn more often to the slower byways of print, nature, the tactile. Thanks, Alice Friman and VP for helping us think about these things, each in our own way, and as we sometimes “fight my way back.” as her poem does.
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I love the comparison to a jazz riff. Yes. And so much to wonder about if we can still make out the traces of other roads.
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Thank you, Jim, for this thoughtful response.
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How I adore Alice Friman! Once I picked her up in Milledgeville and drove us hundreds of miles on a three-stop poetry tour of the South, all arranged by Laurel Blossom. Edgefield, Aiken SC, to Augusta, GA, of course all great poetry centers of the liberated South! We drove and talked and read and drove and talked some more. I need to go fetch her and do it all again. Pure magic!
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Sean, your fetching comment has unintended consequences. It reminded me that Milledgeville, GA was also home of the local saint/writer: Flannery O’Connor, and I once traveled there in search of her literary ghost (never found). I told this to my Daddy then, and he said he had once courted a “Southern Belle” at the local women’s college in Milledgeville, hitch-hiking there with his guitar. But she had taken another road than his dreams, not wanting life with the son of red dirt sharecroppers. So he took the road north, married my Mother instead, and here I am.
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Those roads presented to us! Frost was such a genius, I’m going to spend my life getting over him and his fateful “music boxes” of rhyme and meter. Your story is much like mine. My mother’s first husband died off Montauk Point in his Navy graduation exercise: flying in formation out of Hero Field, she watching them take off there from a bench, and then three men approaching—much time had passed—to tell her. The whole dislocation of such a thing, She but 21, married 5 months. Even as mother of 4 children later, Floridian ranch life, things to take root in, she was adrift her whole life. She nearly named me Bill after him. I have his love letters to her, he was so internal, was going to be a writer. They were the leads in “Our Town” in their Brooklyn High School Senior Play.
Those roads! Easy or hard—what turns they take.
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Thanks for this bit of family history, Sean. Fascinating the way that life twists and turns.
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