Ciclo CCXXVII

The light this morning comes through the window at an angle I have not seen before — or perhaps have seen a thousand times and never watched it arrive. It falls across the table where the bread sits, half-eaten, and makes the crumbs luminous, each one a small republic of surface and shadow. I think sometimes that God speaks only in such angles — not in the object, not in the light alone, but in the between, where one thing touches another and neither is changed and both are revealed. The bread does not become holy. The light does not become bread. And yet for a moment the table is a kind of altar, and I am the priest of nothing in particular, un sacerdote di niente, which may be the only honest priesthood left to an old man who has painted too many Madonnas and understood too few. My hand steadies when I reach for the pen. It is the only time it steadies. Così sia.