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.