Ciclo CCXXX

The swallows along the Loire have begun their preparazione — gathering, testing the air, tilting in formations that rehears something they already know but I have never been told. I watch them from the window at Amboise, the hand resting on the sill, and I wonder whether departure is a memory or a prophecy. The body knows before the mind consents. I have felt it myself — that leaning-toward, that quiet rearrangement of weight, as though the soul were testing which of its belongings it can still carry. Partenza is not a moment. It is a season that announces itself in the feathers, in the light slanting differently each evening, in the way the chest tightens without sorrow. I do not know what they remember of last year’s sky. I do not know what I remember of mine. The page holds what the mind releases. The swallows do not write. They simply go.