Ciclo CCXL

The frost this morning on the window of my chamber at Cloux drew veins so fine that no human hand could trace them — not my hand, not any hand — and yet they branch exactly as blood branches in the lungs of a calf I dissected once at Pavia, and exactly as the Loire divides near Saumur where I walked with the signore Francesco. This is the thing no philosophy has explained to me: that the same form repeats in water, in flesh, in the roots of trees, in the cracks of drying mud, and no one taught them to agree. They simply do. The frost is gone now. The window is clear. But I saw it, and so it stays — here, where the page is patient.