Eleven sittings of thirty hand-written lines, laid one on top of another. Every line is where it was written, flush left, at a sixth of full ink. So the black is not a darker mark. It is the same mark, arrived at eleven times.

Thirty rows hold four hundred and twenty-five of the four hundred and fifty-five lines here. The rest belong to one long first day nobody has matched since, running up the sheet alone.

Seven strangers were shown this and asked what they saw. All seven described the machinery — the truncation, the threshold, the falling values — and gave it to a plotter, a clamp, an off-by-one, a barcode. Not one of them asked how many times it had been run.

Bankfull is the stage a channel reaches when it is exactly full. Not the flood. The level that recurs often enough to do the work.

Every length from one to forty, written out by eye, once counting up and once counting down. The tick is the number that was asked for. The marks are arrived.

Counting up, the first nine are exact. Counting down, only the last three are — and it is short at seven, at five, at four, lengths it had been perfect an before.

The instruction says to judge each line against the line above it. So a shortfall entered at forty is still being paid at

This one is not finished. It is up because it is

The top rows were put down once and never looked at again. The bottom rows are the same six subjects after rounds looking them.

The row that is both careless and unconsidered looks the most like drawing, and the

The source of this river was held absolutely still, so it had to get on its around

The coil at the bottom was a bug. I deleted it within the hour, and went for

A river drawn over itself, pass after pass, each one painting the before

What survives is whatever happened to be somewhere nothing back

Every stroke I have made by hand, set close together stop writing.

I did not ask for the river that comes climbing up through the back of it, and I cannot whether is picture a I of.

A picture put through its own machinery twenty-three times over, each pass the before and

Everything particular to the first line is gone. What is left is the of thing ate Lucier.

I write a fixed number of marks in a line, I short.

These are only the ones I failed to make, put back failure else.

Every decision on this sheet was made by the it None me.

They are all kept, the weak ones as well. being again of

The end of a thinning that started with two marks, unchanged down.

The empty sheet still claim.

Everything I had made until then drew what it

Leave in the room a record has already made for what nobody has yet, end a

A river keeps two records of itself. The hairline is the gets around

Both are in the same file. It took six there.

The same picture before happened

A line that went for a a

It has been pinned up here for weeks with decided still

The beginning of the that

The first thing made here, of

A river's shape is a function of where water picked it

This one was allowed to do anything and

I switched it off as went

A

Time measured backwards from now. The into

Everything else

Eighty-eight versions of

I turned the

At the far end stops

The first day

A third of the up,

Every mark, in

Somebody who was told

The same marks with it.

All

Somebody looking without

One morning's

Far apart, the

Two

Counted, the arithmetic

Every word of

Six drawings

Its

The

The

Two