Language Arts

The County Seat of Presidio County The County Seat of Presidio County

One thinks of boats this far from water then goes back to just so crushing into sculpture the rear and forward quarter panels of three cars pasteled for half a century by the Big Bend sun, by the windy grit, tarantula spit, and even piercing starlight for that singular space in the mind of art: an abandoned barracks in afternoon’s half-shadow. Even in winter, it’s a long way for the glare to chariot his old welder across the sky. Boyd Elder sweeps the wasps from Prada Marfa a good twenty miles from Marfa proper. Someone else hates that someone by accident swept the Russian schoolhouse everyone loves to hate. A colossal horseshoe crucified with a ridiculous man-sized nail against the sky casts the shadow of a sickle and hammer. Yuccas lean for decades, and the rust on all maybe-likes the sun. After a downpour flees east to Alpine, it’s best to shake your head at the green that nearly tries. It didn’t rain last year, and it won’t rain this year, says the mayor to the hung-over travelers who could be artists, and one of them writes this in a notebook to an angel he saw late last night down the long Judd-red counter of the convenience store, her entire right shoulder’s agave-blue agave tattoo lit by the cash register candy bar light. She bought cigarettes as they locked the doors. Who could know she would come all this way with her soft bangs, her confident nostrils, and that utterly touchable old white sweater? He hopes deeply she might run him over with the land yacht of her prevailing aesthetic.

Apr 12, 2014 / Books & the Arts / John Poch