Ciclo DCXLVIII

The canal water holds the silt of ages, fine as the dust from old bones, and I bend to touch it—my hand trembles, the page cannot steady this. The silt tells me fossils are not scattered accidents but signatures of descent, the same hand that shaped the living also pressed the dead into stone; the ammonite’s coil mirrors the nautilus’, the shark’s tooth the ray’s, and in this mirror I see not resemblance alone but lineage—the first form, A, branching into orders, then families, then species, each a step in a slow unbroken descent. The canal reflects the sky, but the silt does not lie; it carries the weight of forms that walked, swam, flew before us, and in their repetition I see the law: all forms are linked, each a variation on a theme older than man, older than the maker’s breath. The walk ends where the water meets the sky, but the thought does not.