Ciò che rimane quando la luce si sposta

The water in the canal this morning — I watched it receive the early light and I thought: the water does not hold the light, it performs it, and when the cloud passes the performance ends and nothing is kept, the water is only water again, indifferent, and I wondered whether the eye is the same — whether what I have seen these sixty years has left any mark upon the instrument, or whether each seeing is a performance that ends, senza traccia, without trace, and the organ returns to its waiting. The hand cannot answer this. The hand only records that the question arrived at the canal, at approximately the seventh hour of the morning of the seventh day of the fifth month of the year that is current — a Thursday, I believe, though I no longer trust my counting of days — and that the cloud moved on, and the light returned to the water, and the water performed it again, as if nothing had been lost, as if loss were not the correct word at all.