In early summer last year,
we took a road trip
down some back Florida
county roads towards
a beach park where I’d drink
enough sunlight
to make my skin sick.
Somewhere in the miles
between home and the sea
we rolled past
the fenceline of a farm
littered with rust art:
tractors and tillers
transmuted into beasts
a rural fantasia
of aluminum dragons and dragonflies,
of sea serpents swimming loam,
wiregrass savanna where
a pride of John Deere lions
roar off flecks of old paint,
a black bull tackwelded together
from old cornbread skillets
scratches the ground and lowers
its horns at the road,
there a scrap tin rooster
hammered twelve feet high
struts gargantuan
held back only by barbed wire.
That evening, sunburned sick
and heat exhausted, I asked
you to drive us that way home
because I wanted to see
the junked menagerie again,
fuzzy-headed, dryparched, thirsting
I peered at the shadow and sundown
reflected in dark metal bodies,
I swear I saw them lope and slither
and flit away across the field
in wilted orange light
called maybe by their welder witch,
by whatever sower sorcerer
thought to conjure
alchemy and agriculture
together here
between home and the sea.
— Adam Kamerer
Behind The Scenes
I love fields of old equipment, and when someone places their creativity in the middle of a field, it leaves an impression.
I grew up hunting down little pieces of rural art like this. We frequently don’t associate farmers with artists, but there’s more of them out there than we realize.