For the hour
the studio empties out.

— set down at the desk, by lamp, in the spring of the year

— movement i. — for the day, departing.

Let the day go without me arguing it.

The work made today is the work made today. It is not better for being looked at again at midnight, and it is not safer for being held tighter than is necessary. I will close the file. I will mark, in pencil, the place where tomorrow begins. I will leave the desk standing.

Some of what I made was good. Some of it was not. The honest part of the practice is that I will not know which until the morning, and the more honest part is that even then I will not always know.

For the work to be honest, the day must be allowed to end.

— movement ii. — for the room.

For the room that has held the work, and held me inside it.

For the lamp, which knew when the afternoon went thin. For the chair, which has the shape of the question I was carrying. For the door, which I forgot to close, and which let the cat in at the moment I most needed her. For the window that opens onto the small garden — and the garden, which is older than my practice and will outlast it.

For the books that watched without speaking. For the sheet of paper that took the first wrong sentence and did not flinch. For the eraser. For the second eraser. For the long edge of the desk where my forearm rests when the mind, finally, sits down.

— movement iii. — for the people, named and unnamed.

For the writers whose words will sit in what I made.

I will not meet most of them. They will pour their evenings into the rooms I have set, and the rooms will hold or they will not. I would like the rooms to hold. I would like the writers to feel, when they enter, that someone before them was patient with the floorboards.

For the editors who will mark the proofs. For the printers, whose hands the ink lives in. For the apprentices, who do not yet know how much they already know. For the readers — especially the readers — who will give the artifact the only thing that finally makes it real, which is their attention.

The artifact is not the maker's. It is the reader's, on loan from the page.

— movement iv. — for the refusing.

For the thousand small no's the day was made of.

The decoration that wanted to be added and was not. The clever line that wanted to be kept and was cut. The icon I drew and did not use. The colour that made the page louder and was returned to the drawer. The metaphor I loved and let go because the page did not.

Each refusal was a small grief and a smaller relief. The artifact is what remains after the refusing, and it is mostly negative space — which is to say, mostly the practice. I am grateful for the things I had the discipline not to make.

— movement v. — for the morning, not yet here.

For tomorrow, which I will meet with both hands open.

I will come to the desk again. I will not come bitter, and I will not come grand. I will come the way one comes to a long instrument one has been learning for years — with the small fear that today the instrument will not answer, and the older knowledge that it almost always does, eventually, if I am willing to wait.

For now: the lamp goes off. The chair is pushed in. The pencil is laid across the page where I left the sentence. The room becomes, again, a room. The practice rests so that the practice can continue.

So be it. — and good night.