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Alice Friman
The Iron Cross
Bernheim Forest and Arboretum
Three-leafed, I figured it was a kind
of shamrock, but red, the color of old slaughter.
I thought of romantic Ireland dead and gone,
Maud Gonne in her grave and Yeats’s tree
watered by sacrifice and blood. But when
I discovered its name, I heard jackboots
and the Panzer Division grinding over Europe
and imagined another kind of bleeding, the ground
still sickened with it. I walked away.
Past the river birches and the tupelos,
past the tamarack in its copse of cousins,
then up to the overlook and bench
dedicated to Rebecca Ruth Gutgsell
who lived forty-four years on this earth
and in whose memory I sit among twenty-three
Virginia pines, tall and thin and rich
with cones. And I wonder, because
for Rebecca (and me) those Iron Crosses
cross too close for comfort, if sitting here
she’d notice how the pine’s bark looks cracktoothed,
the color of clot or bleeding brick,
and conclude that these trees too
were placed in memory, but for a whole city
ground under a boot, pulverized by war.
I know, I am prone to projection,
but a world beyond my say-so and how
is too inconceivable a place to live. Once I saw
an Australian eucalyptus that oozed red
at the slightest scrape, and I remember thinking,
here stands Mother caught in some vegetable dream
of suffering—her favorite halo. Or the time
at Birkenau when the grasses, grown long and
sleek from the ash that fed them, hissed at my knees.
Iron Crosses. Yesterday I went back.
They had sprouted flowers, baby pinks
laundered clean as Hawthorne’s ribbons. But the leaves—
so frail to suggest such purpose—shimmying
in the light wind, you’d swear they were laughing.
ALICE FRIMAN has new work in Boulevard, Indiana Review, Prairie
Schooner, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and others. Her latest
book, Zoo (University of Arkansas Press, 1999), won the Ezra
Pound Award from Truman State University and the Sheila Motton Prize
from the New England Poetry Club. She has received fellowships from
the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, and the
Bernheim Foundation, and she won the 2002 James Boatwright Prize from
Shenandoah. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia.
“The Iron Cross” appears in our Summer
2004 issue.
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