Brushstrokes

Long dark blades rise from the bottom of the picture and sweep out to either side, and from among them fine threads curve higher still, each ending in a small touch of red.

Nothing else is there. No vessel, no ground, only lines against a pale grey-green, and it reads less like a photograph than like a sheet of calligraphy: a broad stroke laid down with the full brush, then the thin ones flicked out at the end of the gesture. And the red. In a Japanese ink painting the last thing added is the artist's vermilion seal, pressed in the corner to say this is finished, this is mine.

Here there are five of them, small and scattered, as if every line insisted on signing itself. It is how a life looks from far enough away: many strokes, some bold and some barely there, and each one marked, somewhere, as ours.

Perhaps every gesture is signed somewhere.