a man walks slowly in the fields of autumn. he sees tall grass swaying in the cold breeze, here and there a tree. the sinking sun, the sky suddenly yellow. at some point a dog comes along and rubs against the man's legs. he bends down and strokes its head. every now and then he thinks of himself as a child, he thinks of lost loves. fleeting images, no more substantial than the meeting of a fallen leaf and a branch reflected on the water's surface. perhaps even less trembling of his heart. but most of all, he remembers voices, a certain music which had always seemed to punctuate the quiet unfolding of what others had called his life. for no reason at all, two fragments of poems return now and then:
Yet he says much who utters "evenings,"
A word from which grave thought and sadness flow
Like rich dark honey from the hollow combs.
and
this was “absolution”
we turned the words in our fingers
like coloured pebbles
smiling vaguely, shy,
wondering what they meant,
wondering what we had been.
reaching the top of a small hill, he stops for a moment, leans against a tree and lets his eyes roam over the horizon and what slowly begins to take the shape of distances.
"if i die now", he says to himself, "then everything which is held inside the word evening as i am uttering it exactly this moment, is lost. no clinging to memory, no dream of absolution. this precise and stunningly clear configuration of the universe, as it is right this moment, the shape of these fields, the cotton-like grasses i passed by, the warmth of the dog fur lingering in my fingers, my shadow as it is stretching now across the path, these glowing colours of autumn and i myself, my body heavy with the world that i carry inside, not simply mirroring the one outside but lending it the clarity of a soul, the singleness of a purpose, will be lost. as if they had never existed. countless mouths will still open to say evening all over the earth, yet this particular weaving of time and space and soul, which now seems to be, as i feel it, essential, perhaps indispensable to the universe, will be no longer."
while his lips are still rounded, once again giving birth to the same order of seemingly meaningless sounds which compose the same word, "evening", all over again, he notices that this thought has ceased to fill him with the absolute horror he had so often felt in his younger days. instead, he smiles quietly at the way the sun, suddenly bright yellow, seems to be caught in the black telegraph lines cutting through the red of the sky. the colours hurt for a moment, though this too might have only been a fleeting impression. then he sees a flock of crows flying low over the disappearing fields.
the man lies down in the grass. the light falls obliquely upon his chest, briefly, as if splintered. in a bush nearby, leaves rustle, for just one moment.
the crows, no longer held in sight by a gaze, fly low through the darkness.
