Spinning Pins

The painter has been sitting here and there. He sat gingerly in the grass under trees that dropped small, randy fruit, which sour the air by melting into a paste the color of raw sugar. He sat on a broad slope of rock on whose left edge a foot-wide braid of water runs; he looked at the sky through the break in foliage made by the smooth chest of stone. He sat on a stool among sharp-edged stems and saplings, looking at one square foot of complicated ground and listening to crows and faroff engines.

He knows himself to be incapable of spending a hundred years on a painting.