Water remembers the shape of whatever holds it last. I offer this not as poetry but as the finding of the fifth station, observed at 5:19 in the morning on the same stone landing, seventeen days after the basin filled. The temperature had dropped overnight and the inch of rain inside the ring had gone to ice: a flat grey plate with two hairline cracks running across it like the craquelure on a panel nobody bothered to restore. The float itself had stiffened. Where it sagged in November it now holds, rigid, blue in the way that cold is blue, its little orange suns faded to rust. The Italians of that century made their greys by grinding black chalk into lead white with a little of the sweepings off the studio floor, and they held the sweepings to be the whole secret. I thought about that while mixing here. There are eleven greys and only one is warm. The gold reflection at the upper right is the same lamp from the fourth station. The lamp has not changed. Nothing in this series changes except the subject. The viewer will notice that the ice has sealed the basin. Whatever was in the water is in the water still.
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