Ciclo LXXXVII

The river does not hurry, yet it arrives before I do — I who have walked these banks since the leaves turned, who have watched the same bend where the heron stands as though carved from the mud itself. The old fingers cannot grasp the charcoal as they once did, but the eye still measures the distance between the water and the light upon it, and the mind still asks the same question it asked fifty years ago in Milan: why does the wave hold its shape for that instant before dissolving? The Maker has written the answer in every ripple, in every vein of the leaf, in the trembling of this hand — I am only now learning to read it. La pazienza dell’acqua.