Time’s color is concentrated in the ripe grapes of the vineyard. At first, time appears in a very intense green, small and hard as a marble, and thus it makes us begin to roll. As the season advances, time swells, becomes translucent, you can see the inner striations of its flesh, a tremendous longing to be a promise, to be realized, whether for teeth or for the birds’ beaks.
The summer seems endless, and so the grape swells, injecting into it the purple of its nights, the piercing sweetness of the stars that belong to these months: the two Bears, Scorpius, and Sagittarius. Later, as September progresses, the Perseids appear in the East, increasingly early, that cluster of diamond-like grapes around which our galaxy tunes its spiral song.
It is the moment to harvest them from the vine: those Perseids, thick and firm, that have finished ripening among the leaves of the vine, perfuming our face with an enigmatic alphabet of chlorophyll.
The clusters press into grapes of toasted, violaceous, and crimson hues. They are the ultimate exaltation of desire, the explosive fullness of the grape before it begins to wither, the coolness of sugar before it loses its water, and thus the wasps know it as well, also the last of the summer, which bore into them one by one until only a floating shell remains.
I know it too, having eaten them directly from the vine, just after dawn.
The last sun of summer slides across you, and it is then that you move me most, oh, dionysian grapes, bearers of an intense, serene, and still-held joy; one step away from your unavoidable transformation into food, into wine, or into futile fruit that shrinks and wrinkles on the same vine where you were born, or already fallen to the earth.
It is now that you take on the definitive color of time, and you are like a blush-colored shadow, which has reached its climax at the moment when there are almost no witnesses. The swallows have long since departed; and humans have long finished their leisure games, absorbed in their affairs.
Alone and abundant, like books in a forgotten library written with the most inspired effort, you await a destiny that, despite your steadfastness, you do not truly know at heart. Purple, the color of time that has no one for whom.
They say that some of you will be swallowed by stomachs that will fashion the light for those who, throughout the year, tend the vine and, within four more seasons, will gather you again.
Others, pressed, having lost individuality, merged into an unlimited unity, will be resurrected as wine and will serve for the redemption of friends and for the sacraments of our ceremonies.
But, among all, I prefer the grapes I hold in my hand, without any recipient, for there is no room left in cupboards or in fountains. I hold them in my hand, perfect, exuberant, still clinging to the vine.
How much longer. They do not know. They are the color, the scent, and the taste of that time. That is all. To melt with my hands. To become an offering.
It does not matter whether there is a recipient or not. If someone will come to gather the fruit. This is who we are. We are complete. And autumn has arrived.