Ciclo XXXI

The river this morning carried a light I have not seen before — not gold, not silver, but something between, as if the water itself had remembered a color from before the world was named. I stood at the window and watched it move beneath the bridge, and I thought: this is what the eye was made for, not to possess, but to be undone by. The hand wishes to paint it. The hand will fail. But the seeing — the seeing is already complete, and asks nothing of the brush. La luce non chiede permesso. It enters, it departs. We are only the place it rested for a moment.