Horseless
A college boy drives a horseless carriage,
steals peaches from an orchard,
picnics in a pasture, and wheels away
with a carefree wave to a farmer, who curses
a devil wagon in God’s own country.
The future stays harnessed to the past
as long as a motorist stuck in mud
must hitch up to a team for hauling out,
as long as a livery stable manager
must welcome a horse-drawn tank wagon
to supply gasoline he funnels by hand,
though the future is in motion
when a general store owner erects
a gas pump near a hitching rail,
renames the place a filling station,
sells maps of motor trails
to motorists and tin-can tourists.
Holding fast to horsepower,
a farmer might purchase a pickup
to haul chickens to market,
might even try a contraption
called an automobile plow
(dealers will soon rename it a tractor),
but a farmer turns the past out to pasture,
yields to the horseless age,
unhitches for the last time
when Hoover Republicans
promise voters
a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,
a devil wagon for every American family.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Cherokee Parts Store
— photograph by Walker Evans, 1936
A camera can be clock and calendar —
the sun casts almost vertical shadows,
the garage opens at the rear to leafless trees.
An older woman, weary, gazes
at a man a beat-up fedora
who bends over her sedan,
and a boy in overalls stares straight
at the serious camera across the road,
straight at Walker Evans, who once said,
It’s as though there is a wonderful secret
in a certain place and I can capture it.
Here Used scrolls like a capital
and CARS stands like a column,
homage to classical architecture
behind inner tubes and hub caps,
but signage is never secret. Evans, he says
of himself, was, and is, interested in what
any present time will look like as the past.
The recent past is parked out front,
a Model A pickup with muddy,
mismatched wheels, hard times.
The distant past is indigenous.
The present hints at prophesy,
a country with more cars than drivers.