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Growing up in the San
Joaquin Valley in the '50s

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meant that you didn't have
the Salk polio vaccine.

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And it meant that one
of my best friends,

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along with several other
children in the barrio,

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contracted polio.

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And so it wasn't uncommon
to have parents tell you

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that for certain
times of the year,

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you couldn't go swimming
in the public pool,

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and that you couldn't
hang out with your friends

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because they were coughing,
and they might have polio.

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And it turned out
Woody did get polio,

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and he was in an iron lung.

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And this next poem is partly
a tribute to the devastation

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caused by the virus, along with
a tribute to the people who

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worked in the fig orchards.

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But I guess, more than
anything else, on the one hand,

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it's a love poem to the
figs, and on the other hand,

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it's a poem of despair when you
think about the labor involved

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in picking dried figs.

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"An Orchard of
Figs in the Fall."

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"Somewhere deep in the
San Joaquin Valley,

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a ranch foreman prunes
limbs of fig trees planted

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prior to World War I. Kadota,
honey-colored fig, best eaten

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dried like the Calimyrna, but
smaller, tougher, not as sweet.

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Enduring.

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As a child I walked light
in the dried fig season

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beneath the pale green glow of
a hung-low canopy, its leaves

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like many-thumbed hands.

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Summer winds picked at
figs and dirt clods.

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Bend, crawl, bend,
pick, infinite insult

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to neck, waist, knees.

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Any semblance of shade was
destroyed in the noonday sun.

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Lunch was a blur
of bean burritos,

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a dash to the outhouse
at the edge of the field,

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and a thirst for
water on a floor

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full of sun-baked
rock-hard terrones.

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Once I ran from a
boy on a metal brace

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who pitched and rolled
as he asked me to play.

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I ran from the
whispered Tuvo polio.

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I ran from an orchard of figs
in the fall, the stripped trunks

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and arthritic fingers, a
grave of limbs gone wrong."

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