One day… it was a rainy, gloomy winter day. With a mental disarray born of boredom, I was leafing through my books, looking at the endings of the books I picked up with tired eyes, or at the pages I loved, and reading them again.
At the very bottom of my books I found an old pocket notebook. Written four years ago—after finding this, I feel that I need not search for anything else to occupy my troubled soul… I hastily put all the books back in their places and, taking the little notebook, I collapsed into the armchair that seemed to beckon me with a meaning of invitation, like an embrace of comfort, by the stove. Now I was opening the pages one by one. Finally I opened a page. Between the pages, with translucent blue wings, so thin—as thin as a strand of brown hair—frail, tiny field fly, stood dried with a pink field flower that had wrapped around it.
This poor captive little insect, four years ago—who knows where—I must have placed it in my notebook along with the flower it had landed on. I looked at the poems on those pages. The poem on the right was written beneath a small woodland plaque, in an inscription from a flower painted in green. I looked at the other one; it too was adorned with the same care: Crystal Stream…
This tiny fly, hidden in oblivion between the eternal unions of the ode written for that shadow, of the lyrics written with the secret melodies of that crystal stream, created in my soul a sweet, sacred mourning with its spring life. So as not to disturb the sepulcher of inspiration of this spring poem, this captive bird, this poetic memory, I closed that page again with sincere care.
Now whenever I see a notebook, a magazine, I remember this little notebook and this fly sleeping in it with an eternal delicacy…
