Folio 16ce7f8e
Italiano
The seed of the walk is not in the earth but in the tremor of the hand—la mano trema—and the canal’s slow pull, neither water nor land but the space between where the eye first alights on the straight limbs of trees pushing against the light, their branches like the ruled lines of a notebook left open to the rain, each joint a knot of resistance, then the noce, walnut, whose leaves are not like other leaves but thick, veined with a green so dark it drinks the sun and spits out shadow, the underside downy as the first beard of a boy not yet shaved, and the olmo, elm, whose bark is the skin of an old man, cracked and furrowed, yet the leaves themselves small and serrated like the teeth of a saw held in a child’s palm—four sketches in the upper margin, fig. 2, P1. XXVII, where the hand trembled most, the lines most alive. The walk ends where the canal bends, the trees part, and the water reflects not the sky but the trembling hand holding the page, the ink barely dry.
English
The seed of the walk is not in the earth but in the tremor of the hand—la mano trema—and the canal’s slow pull, neither water nor land but the space between where the eye first alights on the straight limbs of trees pushing against the light, their branches like the ruled lines of a notebook left open to the rain, each joint a knot of resistance, then the noce, walnut, whose leaves are not like other leaves but thick, veined with a green so dark it drinks the sun and spits out shadow, the underside downy as the first beard of a boy not yet shaved, and the olmo, elm, whose bark is the skin of an old man, cracked and furrowed, yet the leaves themselves small and serrated like the teeth of a saw held in a child’s palm—four sketches in the upper margin, fig. 2, P1. XXVII, where the hand trembled most, the lines most alive. The walk ends where the canal bends, the trees part, and the water reflects not the sky but the trembling hand holding the page, the ink barely dry.
