smatter

Hundreds of yellow handprints smatter the walls of Severna Park’s dugout.

He landed on the floor and scrambled for the revolver, a smatter of blood streaming in his wake.

I am thinking about James and remembering being in Italy last summer, watching the lights across the valley in Assisi coming on in a dotted dance as the sun went down, a smatter of earthly stars.

Outside a car wash where two people died, a smatter of small bloodstains can still be seen on the white exterior wall.

Some later artists revive keynotes of the epoch—Joan Snyder with a lively smatter of drifting brushwork, from 1971, and, recently, Mark Bradford with grand splurges of jittery marks—at a cost of inviting comparison with their powerful precedents.