Porcelain.

Take it down Tear it up Turn it over Make it new out of old makings: exert what that venerable scatterbrain in Weimar once called the Power of Pulling Yourself Together whereby the master is first revealed. Exposed is more like it: shown for what you are.

Porcelain! If a watched pot never boils, what happens to a pulverized one? These are not heroic fragments, nothing here inherently shapely! No identifiable vessel remains: you picked up the pieces all over the place and laid them down again

according to your own ragged politics of reaching and retracting, no better than breathing really, putting mere drips, untimely ripp'd, not so much where you saw they belonged, but how you surrendered to their various discomfort: an open mind must be open at both ends!

The wrong papers, the wretched old canvases discovered to be no more than rehearsals for much new catastrophe this purple patch, that silver of viridian woven into the web of accommodating earth, our only planet not named for some god . . .

Then glued these scraps, these scrapings, these scrupulous approximations to some consistent field to accidents all that year, once your wild partner in chromatic fantasy had spilled himself out of life like a puddle of paint: these exist only because they have been made to -

compelled, this time, to sort together without alienation, which means they are a final vision. No, semi-final, since the whole soul is never one, save in ecstasy and not merely when, as Yeats declared, it has been rent. Another twenty years had to be lived

before there were Krasner collages again, entire paintings ripped to shreds to let the white light through. But that was when you were dying, as you knew. Meanwhile, there were other allowances to be made, other makings allowed. You decided once again to paint.