For As Far as the Eye Can See Read online

  leaving only small change, which he jingles.

  The light can be seen suspending

  a hazy prismatic fog above

  a long vista of gardens and

  through a tracery of branches

  that a late spring has held for

  a month too long in winter nudity.

  Its stippled shimmering lends truth

  to the painting of Seurat; in a rosy,

  bluish, violet dust, the luminance

  clothes all these things with a

  double that reveals, in philosophical

  heaven, their shapes.

  A fat cumulus cloud floats on a sea of blue;

  it might be a sky by Poussin. It’s much like this

  that we imagine paradise—as an eiderdown

  for us to roll ourselves up in while watching

  all the earth go by below: rivers, valleys,

  mountains and cities, and the oceans

  with their toy boats, the forests, the animals

  on the savanna or the tundra, better

  than on television or at the movies, with

  all the labours, the games, puerile and secretive,

  of irreplaceable little men, each pursuing

  affairs known only to himself.

  We walk through streets we know

  or used to know … the eye

  collides with walls that were not here

  when first we ventured out,

  unwittingly, into this labyrinth;

  a vacant lot which now we see only

  in recollection, was over there,

  where a tower of blue glass rises, a cube

  of hardened sky. But a parking lot

  offers an opening that lets us see,

  at afternoon’s end, the orb of a sun

  which we are pleased to recognize.

  In eight or nine hundred paces, we’ve passed

  a dozen beggars, whom we have pretended

  not to see. Farther along, a pierrot is sitting

  on a folding chair in the middle of the sidewalk,

  preparing his show—there’s no way past him.

  In his left hand he’s holding a pocket mirror

  and applying an ointment to his face, scooping

  it with three fingers from a jar clenched

  between his knees. Absorbed in his business,

  he’s indifferent to passers-by stepping round him,

  amongst whom he’ll soon find a willing audience.

  Some of them, off to the side, are waiting already.

  The light wavers through the window,

  tremulous with rainwash. The whole landscape

  blurs when one squints one’s eyes, smoothing

  the ripples of the water, unfolding the fluid canvas

  woven on the pane by wind and rain:

  a few trees, some grass, the tombstones,

  the road over there, beyond the cemetery

  and, farther off, tight ranks of houses

  at the foot of the hill that blocks the horizon.

  Then the light reaches the vanishing point,

  towards that trembling in the west, that opening

  into which the eye plunges and is engulfed.

  By such a subtle variation in the rhythm

  from the very first notes, which a movement

  at once firm and singing launches

  and withholds in the building up of an edifice

  both unforeseeable and necessary, does one

  recognize, in the sonatas of Haydn,

  a world constructed of nothing but time,

  from the progress in itself of a form that

  seems the only possible homeland, and

  which stands for everything: refrain and

  variation, thrust and abatement in a slow,

  measured impatience, at the centre of continuance.

  We hear the wind gusting over the roofs

  as if through a tunnel and, looking up,

  are astonished to see so much blue, seeking

  we know not what vault, what ceiling.

  The earth beneath the changing sky

  is an imaginary space. A dry leaf

  that has clung all winter, falls. Tiny forked

  flames, of a green shot through with yellow,

  form on the lilacs, at the end of each branch.

  In a maple, red and yellow tufts

  are sprouting; thus the earliest spring

  looks onwards to autumn. Time turns.

  Space is enlivened at last with leaves

  running along the branches’ framework.

  For too long this year the cold

  has kept the trees in a dormant state.

  This is truly the North; it’s raining.

  The low sky makes of the world one room

  under a ceiling of vapours painted with

  scrollings of chalky brightness.

  Warblers, of the black-and-white sort,

  fly down, perch, fly off and are gone.

  The horizon lightens with a long pale scarf which

  would have pleased the austere Glenn Gould.

  A dancer carries the weight of the night

  she’s spent under the eyes of voyeurs;

  a prostitute waits for her customer to leave

  so she can grab a syringe; a drunk is using

  a trash can for a pillow, snoring in the refuse;

  under an overpass, dim shapes shift and turn;

  a vagrant walks away, pushing a baby carriage

  that he’s heaped with his jumble of treasures; the

  pink and green wave rolling and spreading

  above the streets clothes them all in sanctity,

  while those who despise them go on

  sleeping behind their closed curtains.

  Up there on a cordillera of clouds

  the sun has set a glacier too white

  for it not to be a fake.

  Soon this sky will be leaden; there’ll

  be nothing moving unless the icy wind

  (for this is the north, the North

  of grey springtimes and the recordings

  of Glenn Gould) starts a quivering in the leaves,

  barely formed as yet, of trees stiffer

  than fence posts. Outlined on the coppery

  evening, the maple blossoms look as if

  turned on a lathe, cut out with a blowtorch.

  Soundlessly the evening burns, yellow-white

  at the end of this unswerving street

  bordered with a double row of trees,

  and climbing the slope towards the west

  between houses as rigorously aligned

  as on a town planner’s blueprint.

  The shadows blur them all together until

  suddenly this commonplace street resembles

  a setting from Italian theatre, like

  an infinite perspective in front of which

  might be played out, in the failing light,

  some tragedy in alexandrines.

  The day has deepened into chambers,

  corridors, porticoes and passages,

  ever since summer has thrust up

  partitions of foliage, raised up

  hedges and woven the dome of boughs,

  a palace with fluid doorways enclosed

  in walls of light. In countless columns,

  bearing their capitals of real leaves,

  the trees support a blue vault

  painted with real clouds, that move,

  adorned with real birds, that fly,

  and scattered at night with real stars.

  The progress of sunlight along the wall

  may be read as a sign the wind is rising;

  it might be the glow of a burning house.

  In the depths of philosophy’s cave,

  the shades whom Plato locked in must have seen

  movements like these, so lovely.

  The frenzied ballet of the birds suggests

&nb
sp; they’re announcing a storm, the first squall

  of this summer so little like summer.

  Heavy clouds jostle and bump along

  a horizon suddenly solid as concrete,

  then space fills up with a thick rain.

  It all has to fit into twelve lines—a lesser sonnet—

  all that’s depicted at every instant inside the cave

  dug out by Plato for the chaining up of those

  whom he deemed to be dupes of illusion. But in his

  system’s sphere, the soul struggling to be free

  had to swap for a stale whiteness, all pleasing things:

  these wind-harrowed trees, the play of sun and shadow,

  that pink-and-brown bird alighting on a wire.

  So I shall settle for the paradise of what I see:

  I trace this rectangle of twelve lines and

  make of it a window through which to observe

  all that appears, and that happens once only.

  The sky behind’s a canvas loomed from mist

  and storm. The nearer view, of housefronts

  in brick and stone, offers plain flat tints of

  red, brown and grey, as in Breughel.

  Beyond the rooftops we look down over, a slender

  pointed steeple stands out against the light,

  all depth lost. A fine rain, hardly more than

  a dust of droplets, quivers in the air, while

  colours, saturated, exude subtle seepages.

  A man in a khaki raincoat, looking tiny

  when seen from the sixth floor, walks

  along a hoarding plastered with posters.

  File folders, open books, a notebook,

  some pencils, a floppy disk, an eraser,

  a notepad, an ashtray, a pencil sharpener,

  a paper knife, a computer, a ballpoint pen,

  a packet of cigarettes, a ruler, a cup;

  the sun splashes this jumbled arrangement

  with patches of light, and its movement from right

  to left marks the passage of happy hours.

  Any table covered with objects randomly assembled

  is a still life that could be painted or described.

  Towards ten o’clock, a line of shadow will pass

  across the dictionary, which contains all poems.

  All that is offered at every instant: splinters

  of sunlight, the sound of the wind, yellow,

  rust-coloured, wine-red leaves, whirling …

  on another day, under a hardened sky, there’ll

  be the geometric houses, etched with a chisel

  into the eternity of an afternoon’s end.

  And reader, on the page, you will read what I

  have before my eyes, what I set down in these words

  and what I conceal in them, since they convey

  only what you find here, what you put in;

  if you consent, I shall not have counted their

  syllables or pondered their meanings in vain.

  A pair of sparrows hops across the flagstones,

  showing off, parading their pale bellies,

  their grey-capped heads and striped wings.

  In syncopated skips, one after the other, they pass

  from shadow into sunlight, that paints their feathers

  with lovely brown and black splashes.

  Their little round eyes miss nothing, ever vigilant

  for possible danger, always close at hand: there,

  in that bush, here, under this bench, everywhere.

  Something has flickered, either a patch of sun

  or nothing, conjured up by their endless anxiety

  and, in a whirring of air, they’ve vanished.

  At night, in the business district where,

  a few hours later, a crowd will be thronging,

  we can wander voluptuously alone

  through a setting that seems nothing more

  than simply false, as we follow streets filled,

  at other times, with cars and trucks.

  We can plunge into solitude and darkness

  when nothing is left but the city’s shape,

  like a deserted stage.

  All useless now—the names of the streets,

  the billboards, the traffic lights—and the silence

  of these new ruins lets footsteps ring.

  We see the rain in the sphere of brightness

  cast by a street light near a rowan tree.

  We hear its ongoing whisper as water

  patters over the leaves and splashes

  on the roadway; we listen with pleasure to

  its periodic murmur, infinitely reassuring;

  we watch the endless weaving of the raindrops

  through the air, over the roofs, the trees, the street.

  The whole night is filled with its susurrus

  which dwindles, then swells again, returning

  like some inexorable trampling, soft-footed

  and coming from all sides at the same time.

  Places like this seem vaster, always,

  at night. There’s a sound of fountains

  playing, spewing up streams of light.

  The wind surges between office towers, then

  wanders in the open, ruffling the ornamental

  trees some landscaper has set out in an

  even row to replicate the bank’s colonnade.

  Cars pull up at red lights, then start off

  again with a noise of gears meshing.

  At once it all seems theatrically

  deserted, this setting of stone and glass

  overhung by a cardboard cut-out moon.

  Downhill, the city fades from view

  under a watercolour sky, everything melting

  into it where the horizon line should run.

  Between the treetops in the nearer view,

  through an opening found by stepping to the right,

  is a dome floating high above the roofs,

  which we see with matchless clarity through

  the prism of a rain so fine that we divine it

  without quite seeing it: almost an oscillation

  of the light, an imponderable architecture

  of reflections, with the fleeting beauty of that

  which one will think one has not seen.

  The narrow street climbs and turns under a thread

  of sky edging in and out amongst buildings, hardly

  visible enough to see what the weather’s like,

  if it’s raining or not. Before reaching street level,

  daylight here takes on the colour of the walls,

  which seem stuccoed with dust and ash.

  Once past the bend, reached with slow steps

  because we’re climbing a fairly steep slope,

  and because this stern setting invites meditation,

  we notice, through a vertical slit, the place

  where a lake of luminescence quivers, source of

  that rivulet of daylight we were following.

  Lakes of blue are displayed between the treetops,

  as calm as if they’d been painted,

  as saturated as if they’d been squeezed

  straight out of a new tube of acrylic onto

  the sky’s canvas, iridescent in the sun

  and woven of air, light and water vapour.

  It’s no small feat, such chromatic purity,

  at once transparent and stony as a trompe-l’oeil

  on the vault of a baroque church, but one would

  search in vain through this real, this empty sky,

  for a saint’s apotheosis, accompanied by the

  swish of wings from a troupe of cherubim.

  A truck rolls across the intersection

  trailing behind it a bluish plume

  through the nine o’clock light.

  Wandering in the cool and limpid air

  we see movements bereft of meaning;


  they might be splinters of space,

  or shards of light tumbling from the roofs,

  as if traced by a cubist painter

  between those houses, had he painted

  this street, at this time of day,

  in the newness of a world restored

  to the paradise of its first names.

  Between the trees, over by the cinema, we catch

  sight of the sun setting a slow fire whose gleam,

  beyond the park, tinges the facing houses.

  After having gazed at its metallic splendour

  through the gap the expressway opens to the river

  (stream of mercury, haze of copper, fume of bronze),

  we’ll find its embers once again on a cornice

  in a street the daylight won’t have reached and

  where it shows itself, furtively, only at noon.

  For the moment we’re strolling an avenue of maples,

  like the country setting for some hermitage,

  all golden, and scuffing our feet in the leaves.

  A whorl in the third windowpane is

  bending the landscape. Move your head and

  at once the roof’s edge pinches and folds,

  at once the brick wall takes on

  the pliancy of cloth, wrinkling and stretching.

  And where does this game lead?

  A simple bubble in a sheet of glass and

  all you thought so solid is making a face.

  To what serves mortal beauty? Hopkins asked,

  and answered, too quickly, that it kindles

  in man’s mind the desire for what exists.

  But look: it’s nothing but a fold, or a knot.

  A straight line between two fields of blue

  is enough to make a seascape, minimalist,

  but a seascape nonetheless if the observer,

  whom one sees from behind as in Friedrich, adds

  a little good will. Missing was the movement

  of waves at the bottom, always the bottom, fringed

  with the foam we’ve just added. With that come the growl

  of the undertow, the cold air, salty, seaweed-scented,