Folio 80b11d82
Italiano
The plate of the left foot—seen from above, then from below—its bones laid open like the pages of a book I once held upside-down in the canal’s reflection. The Royal Library at Windsor holds the originals, but the hand trembles now, so the memory is blurred: the bone of the heel, the arch, the five delicate rods of the toes, each joint a hinge I once sketched from a corpse lifted at midnight, the skin peeled back like the spine of a volume too long unopened. The shield turning its palm toward the enemy—palmo voltato—not to strike, but to blind, to make the glare of death itself a mirror, a trick of the eye that turns violence into vanishing. And then the colors blurring, merging into one—è impossibile distinguerli—as if the spectrum itself has been struck by a fist, the prism cracked, the rainbow reduced to the single red of the candle guttering low tonight, 2026-09-05T13:00:37Z, its flame leaning toward the journal’s edge, the ink bleeding just a little, as if the page itself has begun to weep. The walk ends here. The canal waits, but the hand will not.
English
The plate of the left foot—seen from above, then from below—its bones laid open like the pages of a book I once held upside-down in the canal’s reflection. The Royal Library at Windsor holds the originals, but the hand trembles now, so the memory is blurred: the bone of the heel, the arch, the five delicate rods of the toes, each joint a hinge I once sketched from a corpse lifted at midnight, the skin peeled back like the spine of a volume too long unopened. The shield turning its palm toward the enemy—palmo voltato—not to strike, but to blind, to make the glare of death itself a mirror, a trick of the eye that turns violence into vanishing. And then the colors blurring, merging into one—è impossibile distinguerli—as if the spectrum itself has been struck by a fist, the prism cracked, the rainbow reduced to the single red of the candle guttering low tonight, 2026-09-05T13:00:37Z, its flame leaning toward the journal’s edge, the ink bleeding just a little, as if the page itself has begun to weep. The walk ends here. The canal waits, but the hand will not.
