In 1964, Dickey published "Cherrylog Road," an exuberant, comic boy-meets-girl that abandons the ritual conventions of courtship. Nostalgic, yet standing clear of the scene, the poet exhibits his characteristic masculine energy by dramatizing a daredevil's flirtation with danger. For structure, he chose a tumbling eighteen-stanza framework relieved of a strong metric order by frequent enjambment and rhythmic inconsistencies. In pulsing iambic trimeter, the speaker, an uninitiated motorcyclist indulging his fantasy in an auto junkyard, anticipates a tryst with Doris Holbrook. Acknowledging that Doris's father is capable of flogging his wayward daughter and stalking her seducer, the youth accepts the threat, enjoys a breathless coupling, then charges "Up Highway 106," his future determined by the audacity of forbidden sex.
A near-parody of Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman," Dickey's narrative breaks into the frenetic adolescent mindscape. Opening on the sexual implications of the Cherrylog road, a reference to a town in northwest Georgia as well as a fused image of female virginity and engorged phallus, the poet becomes a voyeur ranging over heaped automotive junk in pursuit of sex-driven youth. The clutter of the 1934 Ford, Chevrolet, and Essex inspires ego-active imaginings of moonshine running and racing, both products of the South. In the sedate Pierce-Arrow, the central intelligence can play the stuffed shirt. In the back seat, partially walled off by a broken glass panel intended to separate chauffeur and passenger, he engages the interphone to dramatize the role of sanctimonious benefactor to an orphanage.
