Cherrylog Road

Exploration, anticipation, imagination, fulfilment—and its aftermath, form the architecture of this poem of youthful sexual adventure. The setting is created in the first stanza with much specificity: the junkyard is located off Highway 106 on Cherrylog Road. This grounds the poem in a realistic setting. The first car is a Ford covered with “kudzu” (Line 4) (a kind of vine) with the back seat ripped out. The narrator immediately imagines that during the car’s useful life it was used for the transportation of corn whiskey, a kind of moonshine that was popular in the South during the Prohibition era (1920-1933) and later. The next car is an Essex, a type of car that was manufactured from 1918 and 1933. The boy notes that it includes a “rumble seat of red leather,” (Line 9) an upholstered seat that unfolded from the rear of the car; a passenger in the rumble seat would be exposed to the elements. As he explores the cars, he cannot help thinking also of the sexual encounter he is expecting. It seems that he and Doris have done this before. As stanza 4 hints, and stanza 10 makes more explicit, Doris has an excuse for coming to the junkyard; she takes back to the farm some useful parts like headlights or spark plugs to justify her visit and allay any suspicions her father might otherwise have. While he thinks of this, the boy gets in and out of the cars imagining he is taking part in a “wild stock-car race” (Line 24). He does this many times, pretending he is an “envoy or movie star” (Line 28) and that the “crickets” (Line 29) are greeting him as such.

Stanza 6 contains the first of the animal imagery that features prominently in the poem, as the narrator likens himself to “toad or kingsnake” as he makes his way to the center of the junkyard, to the old Pierce-Arrow, the description of which and his imaginative fancies about take up more than two stanzas (starting at stanza 6 and continuing through 8). Pierce-Arrow was a motor company that manufactured cars from 1901 to 1938 and was known for its luxury cars. The boy notices the “nickel hubcaps” that were a feature of many automobiles of the 1930s; they would be stamped with the name of the manufacturer and were considered a decorative design feature. The narrator gets a lot of enjoyment from this old vehicle, presenting it as a symbol of the segregated South, with what he presumes to have been the wealthy lady owner and the black driver. He does not have any trouble ventriloquizing the lady’s words, imagining her boasting of her proposed act of philanthropy—giving some toys to children who have shown they can behave themselves. As he indulges in this pantomime of talking over the car’s interphone to the chauffeur, he cannot keep his mind off Doris and what he hopes is her imminent arrival. He is going to be in charge of her in the same way that he goes from car to car, imagining himself in charge of each one of them. His references to going in and out of the cars may have a sexual connotation (the slang expression “the old in-out” refers to sex). He also refers to her twice as a mouse (in stanzas 9 and 15), which again shows that he sees himself as the strong masculine figure who hunts down the smaller, weaker creature.

Doris finally shows up with a wrench that she will use to detach and take home some valuable auto parts so that she has “something to show” (Line 60) to her father as a safe cover for the time she has spent away from home. This is in addition to what the narrator, who seems impressed with his own sexual powers, imagines will be her “lips’ new trembling” (Line 61) following their sexual encounter. Stanza 12, however, shows that he is not so confident in dealing with the girl’s father. He wants to send Doris home without any trace of who she has been with. If they are discovered, the girl will likely get a whipping with a razor strop, and the father will lie in wait for the boy with a gun. Thus, in the boy’s view, the girl is there to be conquered—like a young red-blooded male should—but the father is to be feared. This reflects the powerful but specific stage of life the boy is in; he is old enough and confident enough in his masculinity to be fully sexually engaged with a girl, but he is not quite old enough or established enough to match the girl’s father.

Once Doris arrives, the couple loses no time in coming together. They bring life—physical, procreative energy—to an otherwise dead environment, where the “blacksnake dies / Of boredom, and the beetle / knows the compost has no more life” (Lines 79-81). The next two stanzas, 15 and 16 are dedicated to describing what they do but only in an oblique way. The repetition in “I held her and held her and held her” (Line 85) suggests the thrusting motion of the male, and the couple’s frenetic activity is metaphorically expressed as “Convoyed at terrific speed” (Line 86), and is contrasted to the unmoving cars around them. They are “glued together” (Line 93); indeed, so energetic are they that the hooks of the seat springs work their way up and “catch us red-handed” (Line 95); the stuffing in the back of the seat starts to spill out and seems to share the excitement of the lovers, since it is described as “breathless batting” (Line 96). When they are finished, they leave “by separate doors” (Line 98), which suggests that apart from sex, they have little to do with each other. The boy leaves on his motorbike, which is transformed into an image of masculine power as he roars up the highway in a state of exultation, while Doris walks back to the farm.