By the time Walker Evans arrived, there wasn’t much
besides the shrug of a tenant house,
sun-stiff shirts hung like paper-doll garland.
Red-clay road, a gash in the earth. Come evening,
an oak limb strew a negligee of shadow
across the barn. He’d never seen light
touch things like that, nearly prayerful,
the way it blotted roofs and wood floors.
It would prove as impossible to capture
as the odor of smoke, lye soap, and sleep
the children carried like clouds in their pockets.
He tried leaving them out, but to photograph
a field is to hold a mirror to longing.
Even cutlery kept between a board and wall
reminded him of them wedged in the single bed
Years later, a potbelly moon would spit stars
across Massachusetts, and he’d remember
the baby napping at Mrs. Field’s breast.
How, just before he made their picture,
she stroked a lock of blond hair and
launched, in the child’s dream, a paper boat.
There is in every photograph a secret
that implicates the viewer in someone else’s memory
of a pasture, a rusted sign, a dress pattern.
It’s what love does: makes room
for a boat on a tenant farm in Alabama.
All day he’d wait for the right light
on a stove, by which he meant to say
the effect of them on that place. Even long after
the grown child inherited his forbearers’ sleep
like the emptiness under the belly of the house.
Discovered by Daphne who says, correctly, This talented woman writes like a well hung, glossy shutter: true, tight and gorgeously smooth.Posted by Vanderleun at June 8, 2011 8:32 PM
