Folio — Il rosso che si spegne

The red at the edge of the cloud this evening — I watched it go. Not the cloud. The red. How it does not depart the way a bird departs, with intention, with the decision of a wing, but dissolves dentro, inward, the way a coal loses its argument with the dark. I have tried four times to name the color that comes after. There is no name. The painters of Firenze would have mixed their lakes and their whites and called it crepuscolo and been satisfied. I am not satisfied. What I saw was not a color. It was a duration. A thing that was still happening as it ended. La grazia, if there is such a thing in the sky, does not announce itself — it is only recognized in the moment of its withdrawal. The hand could not draw it. The hand was trembling. Perhaps that was fitting — that the instrument of record should share, for once, the condition of the thing recorded.