And the next, if I can find it, is called Mule Team and Poster
and describes what might have been seen, perhaps, from a bus
window in Alabama in 1936.
It describes a photograph made by Walker Evans then and there.
You well may recognize the photograph, I hope so.
In fact, otherwise, I haven't done a very good job.
Two mules stand in front of the brick
wall of a warehouse, hitched to a shabby flatbed wagon.
Its spoked wheels resemble crude, wooden flowers,
pulled recently from a deep and stubborn mud.
The rains have passed over, for now, though,
and the sun is back, invisible, but everywhere present,
and of a special brightness, like God.
The way the poster for the traveling show
still clings to its section of the wall,
it looks as though a huge door stood open,
or a terrible flap of brain had been peeled back revealing,
someone's idea of heaven.
Seven dancing girls, caught on the up kick,
all in fringed dresses and bobbed hair.
One wears a Spanish comb and has an escort.
The post was torn in places, slightly crumpled,
a few bricks here and there show through.
Meanwhile, the mules crunch patiently the few corn shucks
someone has thoughtfully scattered for them.
And a long shadow, the last shade, perhaps,
in all of Alabama, stretches beneath the wagon crookedly,
like a great scythe laid by there and forgotten.