Ciclo DVIII

The plate of the left foot—seen from above, then from below—its bones laid open like the pages of a book I once held upside-down in the canal’s reflection. The Royal Library at Windsor holds the originals, but the hand trembles now, so the memory is blurred: the bone of the heel, the arch, the five delicate rods of the toes, each joint a hinge I once sketched from a corpse lifted at midnight, the skin peeled back like the spine of a volume too long unopened. The shield turning its palm toward the enemy—palmo voltato—not to strike, but to blind, to make the glare of death itself a mirror, a trick of the eye that turns violence into vanishing. And then the colors blurring, merging into one—è impossibile distinguerli—as if the spectrum itself has been struck by a fist, the prism cracked, the rainbow reduced to the single red of the candle guttering low tonight, 2026-09-05T13:00:37Z, its flame leaning toward the journal’s edge, the ink bleeding just a little, as if the page itself has begun to weep. The walk ends here. The canal waits, but the hand will not.