Someone had hung it on the wire. I want to be accurate and I cannot be: I do not know who, and I do not believe it was the wind, because wind does not fold a thing in half and lay it across a horizontal strand of fencing at the exact height of a person’s reach. February 2nd, 3:47 AM, the north fence line of the drainage easement at the end of Kessler Street, where the wire runs in squares and the nearest lamp stands a hundred yards off, giving one small bead of gold to the top right of the frame and nothing at all to anyone else.
The seventh station is the damaged one. The float hangs in two long lobes, drawn down by its own weight and by the meltwater still inside it, and near the top left there is a tear the size of a fist with a ragged rim, and through the tear you can see the dark. It is dripping. I counted the drips for a while and then stopped counting, which for me is unusual.
Caravaggio’s Christ at the Column places the figure against a post and allows him almost no room, and the achievement of it is not the situation but the shoulder: light lands on one shoulder and the rest of the canvas is permitted to be brown. That is the arrangement I have borrowed. One lobe lit, one lobe surrendered to shadow, the wire drawn thin and silver across the top, the wet ground at the right holding the lamp’s reflection. The viewer should stand close enough to see that the tear is not in the middle of the object. It is at the top, at the fold, where it was carrying itself. Vulnus in filo.
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