A Walk in the Park

By Alice Friman

LSU Press poet Alice Friman shares a poem that sprang from a life-changing experience.

Photo of a park by Mike Benna
Photo by Mike Benna

For me, writing poetry is the great permission. Everything and anything is allowed. The only stipulation is to do it well. Sometimes things progress smoothly; often, and more often, not. Sometimes it’s near impossible.

At about 11:20 a.m. on December 24, 2024—the day before Christmas—I suddenly experienced a life-changing event. An event that surely demanded a poem. How to write it? Since everybody and everyone who ever lived experiences such an event, how to make my personal happening unique, original, and interesting?

What happened? I died. How to write a poem about that? Such a task is especially difficult because obviously as I sit here writing this, struggling with the idea, I am, or must be, very much alive. But Reader, I tell you true, I was gone, code blue, kaput, done.

First of all, to answer the question everyone asks: No, there was no white light, no St. Peter, no pearly gates. No angels, no flaming swords, no judgment, no beloved grandmother holding out her arms. No Anubis to lead me to the underworld. I admit, I could have used such metaphors. It would have made the writing of this poem easier, for all those phrases serve only to pretty things up and ease the difficulty of how to describe a death. Indeed, there was no stark realization of what was happening until way after the ambulance crew, or was it the firemen, cut off my clothes and applied the defibrillator to my stopped heart. It seemed my mind split. The part that thinks, realizes and registers emotion such as anxiety and fear, was absent. The part that informs matter-of-factly and coolly only what’s going on—the incessant banging on my chest—was all that remained. As I came out of the nothing, or, more accurately, the dead space that is nowhere, there was only a sort of mild curiosity. “The mind’s job is to save your life,” and if that means shutting a part of itself down, “cauterizing, cutting it out,” so be it.

The poem is written in the third person—an old woman walking in the park (true to life, my life) when she collapses. The poem picks up as I did, only after the fact, in an ambulance, being pounded on the chest. Once in the emergency room, I woke to see the whole ambulance crew standing around watching me. “Lady,” one of them said, “you don’t know how lucky you are!”

I can’t exactly tell you why I chose to tell this story for the LSU blog, other than the fact that it’s a poem from my new book. I could have, perhaps should have, picked another poem to talk about. Perhaps a cheerier one. But this poem is dear to me, mostly for the end. A few days after I came home from the hospital I had a dream, a dream that seemed to reveal how I felt not about the whole experience, which would have been expected, or even about dying and the close call I had, but about finding kindness and how ordinary-people-turned-heroes enacted a miracle.

Here’s the poem:          

A Walk in the Park               
                 
After the hardwoods had
dumped their leaves, the trees
were left to the pines—sentries in
green uniforms watching over their sleep.
The poplars, maples, oaks, so stripped-
down naked, you couldn’t tell them
from the dead they stood among—
silhouettes cutting their limbs into the sky.
When suddenly, an old lady who walked
among them went down, flat on her face
like a fallen log.
 
The ambulance crew called her Lucky
but that was later, after the hammering
electric shocks and the careening
to the hospital where they stood
shyly in the ER to marvel at her—blinking,
up and awake—whose clothes they had
just cut down the middle to get at her chest.
Here she was, breathing and alive after
they had labeled her code blue, flatlined, gone.
 
Later at home, when she dreamed of them
in her troubled sleep—watched over
by a monitor with a green eye—they were
mere boys, more at home on the soccer fields
than doing life-and-death work
in an ambulance. Boys, who stopped
their play to watch her walking in the park
as if her life weren’t used up already, as if
she still mattered. Then, because they called her
Lucky and were only players in a dream,
they gathered close, and pelted her with flowers.


Alice Friman is professor emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Indianapolis. She now lives in Georgia, where she was poet-in-residence at Georgia College. Winner of the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry, she is a recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and is featured in Best American Poetry.


Available Now

On the Overnight Train collects a lifetime of thought and writing by Alice Friman, presenting poems of passion and permission, gravity and humor, alongside a great deal of truth telling peppered with the salt of invention. Here even the dead clink glasses and remain as alive and present as ever. Here the old stories abide and the new ones, written at the tail end of a life, face the inevitable with clear-eyed candor, wit, and grace.

As Stephen Corey writes in his introduction, “Friman’s poetry is still kicking ass and breaking hearts as she steams toward ninety,” and On the Overnight Train captures the world of a distinctive poet whose work is vivid, understandable, and emotionally honest.


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