The Wake

Red rock, huge red clay soap stones cleave apart at the encircling asphalt’s end: a place in the earth from which something has sprouted, the way old cedars and bristlecone pines push out through their scattered exterior – dark red and dark brown. The white-grey building that ruptures the unadulterated blue is a cross, a cross like a cedar or bristlecone pine. A cross like old world Catholicism and the Virgin of Guadalupe, a cross like a cactus, like a juniper, a plant.

Canned music comes from the pews. Tinny hymnals from cheap speakers from beneath the seats give a background noise, ‘worship, worship to the pulpit.’ A noise for the silence like in Fritz Lang films. The pantomime becomes comic or tragic to the twist of the soundtrack. Reverential awe bleats out of a straining choir in high notes. The eczematous pink faces in white, white robes suppress everything but a note, and through scratchy black screens they douse the church in their constrictions.

There is no flourishing between the rocks, no cactus, no pine. There is a church as a tree’s facsimile in Sedona, on a hill of big houses.