Walker Evans Poem by Allen Braden

In order to develop something akin to miracle,
he acquired a taste for the peeling billboards
that used to promise sweetness to every man
on the day and night crews at Chicago Steel.

He had an eye for the architecture of failure:
the straw broom at an angle in the immaculate
corner of a dirt-floored, single-room shack
housing a sharecropper and his family,

in front of which, at first light one day,
Evans caught four generations of reticence.
He praised the perfection in the ordinary,
in "famous men" with barefoot children

lining the edge of a tilled field outside Decatur
or in black Chryslers along an endless avenue.
From the alignment of light with shadow,
he chiseled away a new and affluent language

hidden in the columns at Belle Grove Plantation.
He spoke of how the past can shape the future
and negotiated, for us, the cracks in Alabama clay
like the Pangaea breaking into singular worlds.