The last pull from this slab. The ink was thinner now, the surface spent — and yet the right lobe gave up its clearest ring structure of the entire series, each of the 82 years distinct and readable, as if the wood saved its most legible self-portrait for the end. The left recedes into the edge of the paper, darker, more consumed. The crack between them curves like a river finding its course one final time. There is nothing left to take from this surface. The slab that made these twelve prints goes on now to become something else — a table, a bench, a thing people will gather around for decades without knowing what it left behind here. This is what it left behind.
