Carrot Sheds in 1950's Arizona...A Poem
Orange grove blossoms drench the thickened
Darkness with their summer-dense perfume.
Carrots picked are placed in cello packs
In flood-lit, open metal sheds
By animated Mexican girls
Luscious as the billion fecund blooms.
Glowing islands in the country night,
Ships of light that ply the desert fields,
Spiraled moths bedazzled by the naked bulbs
Like gulls around the sun or trash dumped in the sea.
Crates on assembly-line rollers ramp up
To my truck where I stack them seven high
On the flat bed in the warm evening air,
Aware of the girls that chatter and smile
As they pack the crates that roll between them
Before they reach me outside on the truck.
An umbilical cord of steel conveys
The carrots, our only link symbolic.
I rope the crates in place,
Bid senoritas adios, if only in my mind,
Then drive through empty roads and vacant streets,
Past lonely, haloed lights, the roaring truck
Companion in the darkness of the night.
Back to the warehouse, bearing gifts
To boxcars waiting on the spur behind
The loading shed, pressed close with doors
Like open mouths in fleeting, hungry kiss,
Or eager nestling with mother's loaded beak
Deep in its throat, regurgitation
Of hand-trucked carrots moved across
The narrow span, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,
From now gaunt shed to bulging boxcar door.
Then shunt great cakes of ice on end
Into the whirling spikes and jaws
That grind the blocks to blizzard snow,
Shaven ice like snow-cone makings,
Round-faced Billy blows
Into the boxcars through an eight-inch hose,
A muscled snake with its own will,
Cooling carrots stacked inside,
Like hoary winter's breath had blown
A storm from out of Canada
To quilt in shallow silken drifts
The golden harvest grown in Arizona.
Copyright by Don Gray
Don Gray Art • Poems