There was an earlier Basin of Rain. A different vessel in a different year, a hubcap behind the arena at the bottom of Clement Street, and I gave it no number at all because I did not then expect to need numbers. This is the second basin and the eighth station, and I am aware that those two facts do not agree. My numbering has never agreed with anything. I let it stand. A record that has been corrected is no longer a record.
November 6th, 5:41 AM. The basket had come off the step in the night and settled onto the flat of the sidewalk on its side, and the whole near wall had broken away from the base, so that what had been a container was now a shallow tray with one lattice edge still standing. Rain had filled it to a depth of perhaps two centimeters. Leaves had come down and were floating in it, five of them, brown and curled, each holding its own small shadow on the surface. The streetlamp had put itself into the water as a single soft coin of gold, wavering, and that coin is the brightest thing in the painting. The blue cord had come unlaced and lay in loose loops in the water, still threaded through two of its holes, no longer pulling anything shut. The mitten has gone the color of old brick. The vessel is now a mirror. It cannot hold clothes and it cannot hold glass, but it is holding the sky, which is the largest thing anyone has ever asked it to carry. Quod continebat, continetur.
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