March 4th, 6:11 AM, on the salt yard fence at the top of Fenwick Avenue, facing east, twenty minutes before the sun cleared the tank farm. Someone had taken the bare rim out of the weeds, carried it four hundred yards, and wired it into a hole in the chain-link. Seven twists of rusted tie wire, done well, done by a person who has repaired a fence before. The rim was doing structural work again. It was holding a gap closed around a pile of road salt owned by the county, and it happened to be the correct diameter for the hole, and whoever did it had no idea they were completing a devotional cycle. They knew they had a hole and a hoop.
Nine spokes remain, hanging loose off the hub in no order at all, and the reflector is still clamped at eleven o’clock, which by this station I consider a small miracle of adhesive. Beyond the fence the sky went the color of a dirty brass instrument, refinery stacks strung along the horizon, standing water in the yard picking up the same light and giving back about half of it. Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew is a picture about a man at a table who is being pointed at and does not yet believe it. The entire event is a hand and a shaft of light through a window that is not in the frame. Nobody in that painting volunteered. The rim did not volunteer either. It was found to be the right shape for a job, which is the only kind of calling there has ever been. Vocata ad ferrum.
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