James Cagney on Gary Soto's "A Red Palm"

(Guest post by James Cagney)

I was sitting in the back of a mildly crowded bus lumbering through downtown Oakland. It was the 90s, I was on my way to class at college. I recall nothing else of the day except a moment of looking once and not being able to look away.  In the years before cell phones forced riders’ heads down into their laps, people examined their world. My eyes swept upward and found a single interior car card displaying instead of an advert or Transit Driver yearbook pictures—a poem. 

A Red Palm by Gary Soto  

You chop, step, and by the end of the first row,
You can buy one splendid fish for wife
And three sons. Another row, another fish,
Until you have enough and move on to milk,
Bread, meat. Ten hours and the cupboards creak.
You can rest in the back yard under a tree.
Your hands twitch in your lap,
Not unlike the fish on a pier or the bottom
Of a boat. You drink iced tea.  The minutes jerk
Like flies.

The bus rattled, but everything within me stilled. I pawed a notebook from my backpack and wrote the words down as if they were a spell. The lines ignited vivid pictures within me, jostling me out of time. I wrote them down to honor and memorize, but I’d lived them already. 

My mother and her only sister communicated through plants. Every summer my Aunt Rosemary would visit from Los Angeles and bring my mother vines and leaves wrapped in moist paper towels snuggled in her purse. She would sit on the kitchen floor and repot a philodendron, the black soil like cake batter flaked along her clean fingers. Before her Greyhound trip home, she’d stroll around our house and with surgical white fingernails slice samples from the Christmas cactus on the window sill or African violets on the fireplace mantle, then slip them into her apron or purse and seal my mouth with sugar. 

Their father, my grandfather, was a landscaper and, from late elementary through junior high school, my first employer. In truth, he was a preacher who worked Sundays at a pulpit gardening a congregation of well-dressed people, with the rest of the week spent in his loose-toothed Ford hauling yard clippings and trash from residences in Oakland, Berkeley, and Piedmont out to the landfills in Emeryville or Richmond. 

It is possible I was not born, but harvested. The hoes and shovels, the rakes and brooms stacked in our garage were as important as the forks and spoons in our kitchen. I knew the sounds: the crunch of crabgrass being uprooted, the percussive thump of a hoe felling thistles or dandelions. 

But I had never been seen and validated. The yard work I’d assisted, watched, avoided had never been mirrored back to me until that afternoon on the bus, first encountering those lines.   

This is a kind of love story. The one where someone looks across a room, and their entire life becomes a pursuit. By then, I’d written screenplays, a 1,000 page soap opera in high school, I played with comic strips, short stories inspired by Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I knew what poetry was—I could identify Langston Hughes, I knew the difference between Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, but so what? Poetry was a pretentious hors d'oeuvre at salons I had no interest in. Poems were the jump-rope rhymes of dead white men. They had nothing to do with me or my family. 

Until “A Red Palm.” 

Until you have enough and move on to milk, / Bread, meat. Ten hours and the cupboards creak. 

In our backyard next to the garden were two garages, one for my mother, the big one for my dad.  My dad was an auto mechanic and his garage a cathedral of metal and steel. Our driveway jammed with Mercurys, Fords, Cadillacs, patients awaiting surgery. The other garage had shelves my mother used for preserves. Her friends, lodge members, and former beauty school students would bring paint buckets and paper bags full of apples, plums, pears from their trees. Then old jars would be sterilized, my father and me sent on assignment to Pac-N-Save for 20-pound bags of sugar and boxes of pectin. Then a season of manufacturing jam, jelly, and spiced chow chow relish at the stove top. Our cupboards creaked loudly with the effort of the entire community. 

But I have not yet talked about the garden from which my mother would haul in aluminum basins full of corn, squash, and sweet potatoes for dinner. My mother labored endlessly on the hallowed ground of earth in our backyard, fenced off from the dog. If she couldn't get her father to bring his tiller and comb the soil, she would hire my older cousin or whatever muscled youth was available, until I became that youth. 

And look at this. All these words, all this memory and life from ten lines of poetry. How does a line of words become a circuit to light up an entire grid in one’s brain? One could argue how that day on the bus I became infected. Days after, I went to the Oakland Library and found Gary Soto’s book. Every line in his collection lived and wriggled with life. I was surprised to discover “A Red Palm” was longer than the ten lines sampled for a bus advertisement, that the author was Mexican—not some dead white dude—and from Fresno, where some of my family lived.    

At the next planting season, I volunteered to turn over my mother’s garden.  This involved loosening the top layer of dirt with a shovel and smoothing down the soft, overturned dirt with a hoe and rake. I placed a boombox on the tree stump at the garden’s entrance, and began work alone in the cool mornings. The task was peaceful and meditative despite how much I sweated and ached. But digging helped me draft. The same earth that easily yields rich food works as a psychic chalkboard. My mind would leave the drudgery and ache of my body to mull over things. I shoveled from the rear right of the garden, working my way down in rows then across. The radio blended into bird calls and shushing traffic from the street. I remembered steel pots full of fruit, the bags of apples and pears that had to be sorted, peeled, and boiled. The cabbages, the shelf stacked with spices. How the kitchen would steam over and flood the house with aroma. My mother would stir her lava red broth of plum jam, then raise the spoon to illustrate like a scientist how the liquid gelled into a sweet waxy droplet. She might stare at an apple or plum in her hand, then, with a genie’s blink, convert it into a new, different thing. 

“The ritual of fruit begins again in June,” I muttered while turning over shovelfuls of soil licking with earthworms. “She quickly buries the dead in a cemetery of sugar where apricots and pears await to be baptized and born again into jam and jelly.” Bright white sweat dripped into the crevices I made. “The walls of our kitchen come alive with the sweat of our ancestors,” I said, thinking of slaves, thinking jokingly about cotton and plantations while my shoulders and back burned over the shuck and thump of the shovel. “The dead continue to feed the living with greasy fingers, stuffing our mouths with the sweet cuisine of history.” 

I felt the entire yard using me to write. As if the shovel were a brush and the dirt a kind of ink. “Take a break,” my mom shouted from the porch. I made a quick transcript of what brewed in my head. As I turned over the shovel, more words emerged. 

The finished poem would be a gift to my mom. I titled it: “The Fire in Her Eyes Redefines an Apple,” a line I couldn’t work into the body of the poem. No one ever called it that. It was known as “The Ritual of Fruit.” And it's a poem I’ve performed for more than 25 years.  

I did not write a poem while gardening. I wrote several. Drafting poems while my hands were dirty seemed an essential part of my writing process. I needed a shovel and a notebook, a rake and a good pen. Sweating over a poem was a good day of work. Any stanza I didn’t like could be immediately buried.  

Gary Soto sentenced me to a life of language. Made me turn around and reconsider how easily I dismissed or shrugged off the alchemic power of poetry. I returned to the poetry section of the library like an addict. Curious about the feelings words awoke in me. A stanza lifted me out of myself and tossed me across a yard.  How does this happen? How does one ignite something so deeply within a stranger? How does the random chemistry of love work?  

My entire life and childhood twitched with life in a single stanza from a Gary Soto poem. My memories were seeds in a stranger's red palm. There amongst his rows, along the hot banks of rivers with pulsing veins of perch, where minutes jerked like flies, stood my grandfather preaching into the earth with his tools, my mother and her basket dripping tomatoes, my aunt and her pockets swollen with vines and leaves, and me taking account of it all.

Oakland native James Cagney is the author of Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour of Chaos Theory, winner of the PEN Oakland 2019 Josephine Miles award. His poems have appeared in Alta, Poetry Daily, Colossus: Home, and The Maynard, among others. Visit Nomadicpress.org for his book, and find more writing at TheDirtyRat.blog