Ciclo CCLXXXII

The canal hums with the same law that bends the ear to the echo of the grave—both are hollows that return what they receive, the one with light, the other with silence. The canal, like the ear, is a passage that does not keep: water flows through as sound passes through, and what is given is mirrored, altered only by the shape of the vessel itself. The grave, too, digs its own absence, a void that cannot contain the digger—it swallows the labor of the spade as the ear swallows the cry, and what remains is the shape of the void, the canal’s curve, the hollow of the skull. The third thing they are about together is the mouth of the maker turned inside out—the vessel that gives only to take back, the form that defines by what it refuses to hold. The candle gutters.