How is it that one man can work
on one brushstroke (and a few spots)
for almost two years?
I thought about
the oriental calligraphers
who spent a lifetime perfecting
that one brushstroke.
Suddenly,
the silence and loneliness
of the painter’s profession
pierce through my heart.

Leaf shows a simple fold
of translucent green paint
that appears as a gesture
of concealment, of implication,
as if the smallest mystery of nature,
the greenness of a leaf,
was being held and protected
within a fold of pigment.

Small reservoirs of oil and Liquin leak
from the top edge of the mark,
and where the green stroke has carried over
to the frame, the paint shows
as a dark varnish, barely perceptible.

With consummate economy,
Leaf draws together nature and art
and shows how natural things live
within and despite history.

Leaf is about the ‘time of plants’
but also about the long durée
which the single brushstroke spills.
The painted wooden frame was added later.

Think of it:
grey Kansas with its headlong wind
broken once by barn doors laying on their side and then
unbroken for miles and free riding through frozen, standing
grass. A cathedral with purple walls— somehow subterranean
though above the ground— where men cage-dance to each
other’s angles but do not glance the paid for swells they make
in mirrors, glasses, countertops; in eyes and brainstems like a burn

and something scopophilic in the soul gears in to what is seen
but not to what exists; how actors in even outstanding erotica report
the lack of desire they feel while watching their own play reel back; how they
are not the moans or counter-moans; the sounds of kissing or the glinting
looks that pass between performers as a cue or like those cubic lanterns master
calligraphers spend a month adorning with a dozen of their favourite poems
only to set a light inside them; to watch them rise with heat and frazzle
to trails of ember in the air.