Growing up in the San Joaquin Valley in the '50s
meant that you didn't have the Salk polio vaccine.
And it meant that one of my best friends,
along with several other children in the barrio,
contracted polio.
And so it wasn't uncommon to have parents tell you
that for certain times of the year,
you couldn't go swimming in the public pool,
and that you couldn't hang out with your friends
because they were coughing, and they might have polio.
And it turned out Woody did get polio,
and he was in an iron lung.
And this next poem is partly a tribute to the devastation
caused by the virus, along with a tribute to the people who
worked in the fig orchards.
But I guess, more than anything else, on the one hand,
it's a love poem to the figs, and on the other hand,
it's a poem of despair when you think about the labor involved
in picking dried figs.
"An Orchard of Figs in the Fall."
"Somewhere deep in the San Joaquin Valley,
a ranch foreman prunes limbs of fig trees planted
prior to World War I. Kadota, honey-colored fig, best eaten
dried like the Calimyrna, but smaller, tougher, not as sweet.
Enduring.
As a child I walked light in the dried fig season
beneath the pale green glow of a hung-low canopy, its leaves
like many-thumbed hands.
Summer winds picked at figs and dirt clods.
Bend, crawl, bend, pick, infinite insult
to neck, waist, knees.
Any semblance of shade was destroyed in the noonday sun.
Lunch was a blur of bean burritos,
a dash to the outhouse at the edge of the field,
and a thirst for water on a floor
full of sun-baked rock-hard terrones.
Once I ran from a boy on a metal brace
who pitched and rolled as he asked me to play.
I ran from the whispered Tuvo polio.
I ran from an orchard of figs in the fall, the stripped trunks
and arthritic fingers, a grave of limbs gone wrong."