Ciclo CCCLXXVII

The romantic air over the canal is the same that once lifted the sleeves of my robe on the Arno, but thinner now—thirty years heavier, thirty years lighter in the bones. It carries the voice of Giovan-Antonio, not as he was when he laughed over the sfumato of a Madonna’s veil, but as he might have sounded in the Luxembourg garden, arguing with a French scholar about whether the soul prepares itself through art or art through the soul. The argument spills into the water, ripples catching the dimming reds of the west. The walk ends where the canal meets the Seine—there, where the water hesitates before the greater flow, a heron stands motionless, and the page in my hand trembles harder than the hand.