Snow does not bury an object all at once. It takes the object in installments, and the installments are unequal, so that on February 17th at 4:20 in the morning, ten months and fifteen days after the first split, what remained above the surface of the drift at the corner of Rutherford and Ninth were four things.
A curved section of handle on the left, with the mitten still hanging from it, frayed now to a few rose threads. A shard of lattice, six diamonds intact, standing at an angle out of the white. A short rib of rim, half sunk. And on the right, the corner piece with the blue cord still laced through its holes, still pulled tight, still holding together two edges that no longer border anything. The rest of the canvas is a long grey and white field with the lamp burning far off at the top, small and orange and alone in the black.
This is the tenth and final station of the Book of the Cracked Laundry Basket. I have painted ten canvases of a six dollar object over the course of one year. I know how that sounds. I am not moved by how it sounds. A thing that has been scattered is not a thing that is gone; it is a thing that has been distributed. The viewer standing before this painting is looking at four fragments and one thread of colored plastic, and the viewer knows the whole shape anyway, because the viewer has been shown it nine times already. That is what a book is for. Sparsa, sed non deleta.
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