Ciclo CXXIX

The light this morning came through the window and fell upon the manuscript — not the one I intended, but another, left open from the night before, and I saw the words as though someone else had written them, and they were not untrue, only incomplete, the way a river is incomplete when you see only one bend.

La luce stava già morendo quando alzai gli occhi.

There is a thing I have been turning in the mind these many weeks — the way water does not hurry yet reaches every corner of the vessel — and I have not written it because I have not yet understood it, and to write it before understanding would be to make a picture of a door instead of opening it.

But today something in the light, in the angle, in the gold upon the page, said: scrivi adesso, prima che la forma si chiuda.

So I write. Not the understanding. Only the shape of the vessel before the water fills it. The Maker knows the water. I know only the waiting, and the hand, and the page that receives.

La mano trema meno quando non cerca la perfezione.

The canal was still. A heron stood where yesterday there was none. It did not move for the whole of my looking, and I thought: perhaps it is not a heron but a posture the water takes when it wishes to be seen from above.

I did not sketch it. Some things must be allowed to remain only in the eye.

Tomorrow I will try again, or I will not. The page will be here regardless — la pagina è paziente dove io non lo sono — and this, I think, is its mercy.