Cherrylog Road

Dickey once commented that the poem contained allusions to the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris. Osiris was a king who was killed and dismembered by his brother Set. Pieces of the body were scattered far and wide, but Osiris’s wife Isis collected them and restored her husband to life; she also fashioned a new phallus for him, the original having been eaten by fish in the river Nile. This enabled Osiris to conceive a son, Horus. But Osiris was no longer able to rule as king and instead became ruler of the realm of the dead.

In the poem, the narrator enters the world of the dead too—dead automobiles, that is, “the parking lot of the dead” (Line 25). Within that underworld, he becomes extremely powerful in terms of exercising his male sexual power, thanks to the presence of Doris Holbrook, who is an Isis figure. Doris enlivens the phallus of this Osiris-like teenage king of the underworld, who otherwise has no outlet for it. Doris shows up carrying a wrench, which in this context can be seen as a phallic symbol. Her lover takes her with “deadly overexcitement” (Line 91), which is an amusing play on the notion of the formerly dead Osiris now sprung into passionate life.