March 3rd, 4:44 AM, after nine days above freezing. The snowbank on the sidewalk side had gone grey and granular and pulled back off the mattress the way a sheet is pulled back, and there it was again, black with meltwater, flatter than I remembered, lying along the curb with the gutter running full beside it and the lamp laying its long gold seam down the wet asphalt at the right of the frame.
Everything that was blue in September is nearly grey now, but the rosettes are still there under the wet, still printed, still refusing. The tear at the foot end has opened wider under the weight the snow put on it, and the coils inside have gone from rust orange to a deep brown. I want to say that the winter did the damage. It did not. The winter only paused things, and what came out from under the snow was exactly what went in, plus five months.
Caravaggio painted the same altarpiece for the same wall three separate times, and twice the priests sent it back, and people call that stubbornness. It is not stubbornness. It is a man checking. It is the same instinct that brought me back down to this curb on the third of March at a quarter to five in the morning, with the snow going off into the drains all around me, to find out whether the thing I had painted seven times was still the thing I had painted seven times. The viewer, standing in front of the eighth station, gets to decide whether it was.
Prints available. Acquire this work as a fine art reproduction, worthy of any wall that deserves better.
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