Seen from Earth, it is a planet.
Seen from the sky, it is a flower.
I am the bird soaring through the atmosphere,
I am the caterpillar crawling across the surface.
I spend my life shifting between scales, then
I take a sheet of paper in my hands.
I love its fragility, its lightness, the breath
it produces as it turns, as it
turns itself.
No sooner do my fingers touch it
than a flavour emerges—marzipan—and the
paper becomes a communion wafer.
I haven’t decided anything; my body knows
before I do.
I sit down and draw.
I look at the whole picture.
Then I move closer.
A line first belongs to a shape.
Closer up, it breaks away from it.
I see its thickness, its irregularities, the
pressure of the lead, the places where the black
builds up and where the paper reappears.
I linger a little longer.
The shape disappears.
What remains is the texture of the paper, the lead residue,
a line that is almost no longer a line.
I step back.
The material recedes.
The lines converge.
The shape returns.
The drawing hasn’t changed.
My gaze, however, shifts from one scale to the other.
I am the bird and the caterpillar.
The bird sees the shape.
The caterpillar moves across its material.
I shift from one to the other.
I step back until the lines
hold together.
I move closer until they cease to
form what I thought I saw.
From a distance, a shape.
Up close, what it is made of.
I carry on moving forward.
The line becomes thickness.
The thickness becomes a deposit.
The deposit meets the grain of the paper.
Then I step back.
The grain disappears.
The deposit becomes a line once more.
The line joins the others.
The shape returns.
In between, nothing has been added.
Nothing has been taken away.
Only the scale has changed.
And yet, I did not see the same thing.
