The hen cocks its head, levels its eye, curls its ancient foot against a rising breast and stands immobile. Glawks and struts on. Shits. Gluts a hopper. Furls and flutes in stone.
***
Manic pin-balls in a towering head, the hail casts up into frozen light, tops like breath then falls again to the warming fog. Whispering down through blackened clouds, the hailstones brake, then rise again on summer’s bellied heat. Hurtled back up ripping out to frigid blue, so donning another glacial rind, they turn and fall. Down fall the growing orbs of ice, weighting hail to deepening wet, spinning slow and up again to meet the Twin.
The boy’s Nocturne falls away to roaring heavy hailstones down, crashing into the Hall’s steel roof. Staccato hammering to thundering tide the immensity deepens, pulls into its silent core, then goes. Riven and held, the silence bears: no word, no sigh, no twisting chair, no crop this year. Pulped and threshed, stripped and stoned into swallowing muck: no crops this year and piano trickles in the swollen hall. Gnarled hands, tractor grease buried in cracks and whorls, clap, and return to laps for Girl’s Chorus. After the final act, relatives and parents file onto the crystal prairie, silent and luminous, so clarified it burns the throat, and witness their loss.
***
No time. No fear. Just still.
In shrieking rend of crashing steel, tongued out from silent bearing stone (this motorcycle)(that spinning Jeep) each crawled to each at rushing speed and melded in this last, this final act. Die into screeching single bright, through gem-stoned glass, a distant hole, the tumbling car in scarlet flames, a vast complete unaltered roar. Blistering orbs, the crusted bone and twisting flesh loft up in clear stone light: a stillness vast and all is seen, in luminous endless detailed all. Spun through a vortex deepening black of sucking radiant colored ribs till blue near Exit 5.
Red Rock, NY, 09/09
Brian Wood. Near Exit 5, 2006. Oil on canvas, 58 x 62 in.
One Comment
gorgeous. terrifying.