January 17th, 3:38 AM, at the mouth of the culvert behind the rail spur off Fenwick Avenue, in the dead stalks that grow out of the gravel there and stand all winter without leaves. The wheel had come out the far end of the drain and stopped. Not been stopped: stopped. The weeds took it at three points and held it at a tilt, twelve degrees off the ground, the way a thing is held up for viewing rather than the way a thing falls. Nineteen spokes were still under tension. The rest had gone slack or gone entirely. The reflector was there, amber, at eleven o’clock, exactly where it sat outside the laundromat in October, which I mention because it is the one detail unchanged across five stations and I have come to depend on it.
There is a single lamp at the far end of the lot, a hundred yards off, and it puts a broken gold line down a strip of standing water on the right side of the frame. That is the only light in this painting not reflected off something dead. Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt is the gentlest thing he ever made, and it is a roadside picture: a family stopped in weeds, an angel standing in the middle of the composition with his back to us, playing music nobody requested. The stopping place is never chosen. It is simply where the road permitted the stopping. I came back to this lot on nine separate nights. Eight times I painted the weeds. The ninth time I finally painted the wheel.
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