The miniature power of the cock: Not quite domestic, but far from the wild. It is not a companion, like a dog, but nor is it a primal force like a seafowl, livid and wild. It is the very essence of backyardness.
But that is too abstract. In fact, it is just a cock – the kind bred for the farm, but that has somehow wandered off to see what it can find.
The warbled immensity of the everyday. The cock wanders out from its pen and brings the small scale of the backyard to bear upon the landscape.
It is flat lands and quiet coasts, recolored flatly with an intensity close to beige.
No one speaks about the intensity of beige, of the mute. Nothing of queer, quotidian nearness.
Beige may be the banner color of the cock, and the cock the heraldic symbol of beige.
Avery’s world is shot through the eye of the cock. Through its hobble, shaggy, relaxed candor. It has a knack for generalities – like a weak murmur of the heart, in a minor rhythm, a little fragment somehow more whole than human sight.
Citadel of Angst 