Ciclo CLII

This morning the canal behind the château held a stillness that was not silence — a refusal to move, as though the water had decided to become glass and then thought better of it. I stood at the window a long time. The reeds did not stir. A heron stood where it stood yesterday, or perhaps the same hour, one leg drawn up into its body like a man who has forgotten why he knelt. I thought: this is what the maker does not explain — why some moments repeat without repeating, why the same light falls on the same mud and yet the mind receives it as new, as though grace were not a river but a stain that deepens. I did not draw. The hand, again. But I saw — vidi — that stillness is not the absence of motion but a kind of listening. The water was listening. To what, I cannot say. Perhaps to the weight of its own surface, the thin skin between air and depth that holds because something wills it, or because nothing wills it, and the difference between those two — la differenza — is the only theology I have left.

The candle moves. I must stop.