Bob Meszaros
“West Rock”
Fredrick Church 1849
In the foreground, across West River,
three farm hands pitching and carting hay,
their oxen yoked to wooden wagons, waiting;
their dog, knee deep in river reeds.
Behind them, in shadow, at a distance,
a solid line of green, then the slopes of fractured
rock—the scree, the talus—below the sun struck
bright red mountain ledge.
No bridges here, no fences, no church
or wooden houses white within the green.
It is eighteen forty-nine
in the Merton Gallery on the first floor
of the New Britain Museum of American Art.
It is a Sunday afternoon, but I can find
no Great Awakening here;
and yet, left of center, between rock ridge
and carts of hay, pointing upward from the line of trees,
what appears to be a single streak of spire white,
but from this distance no way for me to tell
for sure just where the artist stood.
