By April the retention pond at the bottom of the easement had come back to itself, the new reeds were up, thin and hard and pale at the tips, and the tenth station of Lamentations for a Deflated Pool Float was lying among them at the waterline where the channel empties out.
I walked that bank on twenty-two evenings looking for it. On the twenty-third it was there, and it had been there some time, because the reeds had grown up through it. That is the entire finding. Three or four green stems standing straight through the folds of the vinyl, holding it down, using it. What remains is no longer a ring, no longer a vessel, no longer even a torn thing. It is a long grey band coiled on itself in the mud, split along its length, the valve still fixed near the lower left with the faint arc of the smile beside it, and the rest given over to the colour of a skin something has finished with and left.
Caravaggio’s Entombment is praised for the stone slab at the bottom of the composition, the corner of it aimed straight out at the viewer, as though the ledge continued past the frame into the room where you are standing. The reeds do that here. They come forward. Behind them the pond is black and wide, and one lamp on the far bank lays a column of gold straight down the water toward the object, and this is the first time in ten paintings that the light has reached it. It took the whole winter and the loss of every part of what it used to be. The viewer will make of that what the viewer makes of it. I painted this one small, and slowly, and I have not gone back to the pond since. Exuviae, non finis.
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