For As Far as the Eye Can See Read online

  the wind blowing from offshore, the scumbling

  of the light in the heaving prism of the swells,

  and this pallor in the sky, not so blue after all

  when filtered through the spray of spindrift in the air.

  The sun’s taking pictures of the trees,

  in black and white, on the sidewalk.

  Projected on the ground and the walls

  are copies of it all, swayed by the wind

  and extinguished by the slightest cloud.

  Thus there’s a double lying beside you

  whom you never glance at unless it’s his snaking

  shadow while you climb a few steps,

  or else when a melancholy mood

  reminds you that soon you’ll be laid out

  between his insubstantial arms

  in an unending clasp.

  “The bronze rain …” “No, it’s a haze.”

  “The sun’s bronze haze is announcing

  that soon we’ll be plunged into cold darkness.”

  “Not so fast—there’s a choir of starlings

  chirping in polyphony.” “How can there be so many

  of them (supposing there are) without our seeing them?”

  “Never mind, we do hear them, and sometimes

  too we hear the squeaking pully of a solo blue jay.”

  Close to the sun-warmed brick of the wall,

  one feels a philosophical well-being, not

  really inexpressible but certainly very sweet.

  “It’s not going to last, this artificial eternity.”

  In spite of the cars, the rain can be heard

  pattering on the leaves and the roadway

  in this mere murmur, devoid of melody,

  or rather as a silence made audible.

  The rain has no beginning. It seems

  all at once to have been there forever

  in a hidden fold of time. The passer-by

  who’s taken refuge in the doorway of a store,

  looks out and around into blurred space,

  slowly, as if seeking a glimpse of himself,

  shadow of a shadow, shadow amongst shadows,

  in some existence other than this dream.

  Eighteen tomatoes have been set out to ripen

  on the window ledge; the result is a

  still life that could be painted.

  The sunlight adds a rounded white

  highlight to each of them, which is

  balanced by a little pedestal of shadow.

  Beyond the pane, a hedge plaits

  a green tracery that provides a backdrop

  blurred with reflections, over which the light

  streams from right to left. Not even

  the white frame is missing, or the silence

  that consolidates this random pattern.

  The sun just risen above the horizon lights up

  a squadron of clouds that the wind is pushing

  from the northwest across a swollen sky.

  We’ve seen this spectacle a hundred times, on mornings

  in childhood, seeing everything for the first time,

  then later in photographs that stood for the world;

  none of that stems our astonishment at such majesty

  passing above a city distinguished solely by its

  extreme banality. But we’re not really seeing

  that divine explosion of a world’s beginning

  (Earth, Earth, oh burning bush); we’re watching ourselves

  watching it, preparing to remember having seen it.

  A revolving light flashes amongst traffic signals

  in the street spangled with windows,

  at the hour when offices are emptying;

  it’s some small drama, a fender crunched, not worth

  so much as a line in tomorrow morning’s paper.

  The closed sky presses the night down

  over this scene having all the appearances of the fake,

  and which it is, irredeemably. What are you doing

  here, walled in by so much shoddy stuff?

  Darkness streams down across the windshield, swept

  at intervals by reflections from the street lights, while

  you drive down the disorderly street that is your life.

  A wine-red sun smears the sky’s canvas;

  what a perpetually repainted ceiling it is,

  this vulgar decor above the ashen streets!

  We run up against intangible barriers,

  we tramp through snow mixed with mud,

  in the winter’s chill, in the winter’s drabness.

  The soul does not aspire to eternal life;

  it condenses into a breath or faint mist,

  into a haze that thickens the light.

  A crow splashes space with his inky shape

  and, amidst the rumble of buses, performs

  the solo part in a dissonant concert.

  The sun’s low circuit

  daubs the housefronts with light that’s pink,

  white, then yellow, depending on the hour.

  The trees no longer block its passage,

  except with branches, boughs and twigs

  that scribble their shadows on the sidewalks

  in the thick or thin strokes of a writing

  which no one will figure out.

  By four o’clock the show is over;

  the walls seem to lose all substance,

  subsumed into the air as it melts into blackness.

  In sum, another winter day is done.

  A wall of night presses against the window;

  we see nothing there but a surface painted

  in the densest black, evenly, without a spot;

  the pane becomes a mirror turned to the inside,

  replicating the room while revealing nothing

  that we did not see already, except that black.

  It reveals no other space, only a fabric woven

  by the absence of all light. It’s refreshing,

  this bath of blackness, as we imagine it,

  not giving it form, the slick nothingness,

  the truly limitless ocean where, for the moment,

  one has no other face than this reflection.

  A lilac strip, interrupted by the line of houses,

  themselves enclosed by winter branches,

  stands in for twilight in the windowpanes.

  The daylight diffracting through the air’s prism

  has turned blue-black; as always it’s

  the same over-painting in the same pattern.

  It’s slathered with black, ever more

  saturated, and keeps on thickening, blacker even

  than anything Frans Hals ever brushed on;

  it’s clumping, covering everything,

  patiently, not leaving the slightest chink

  which might let us see we know not what.

  The variations of the light raise up

  a different city every day.

  Fog, rain, snow and wind reweave

  the weathered web of streets. Since this

  is the north, the sun’s a rare event.

  At dusk, it’s windows that checker

  the broken horizon with symmetrical stars.

  Then all collapses. The formless murk

  heaps up its immaterial substance,

  until a different space is shaped,

  blind, cut through with close partitions

  that fall away when one gropes ahead.

  The expanse unfurled by springtime

  spreads through the park and through memory,

  under our feet and inside our heads—green.

  We walk in the street, which the sun is

  re-peopling with strollers, and in the idea

  we create for ourselves of a street in April.

  Moment by moment we move from the room

  we fashion from memories, true or false,

  to the heaping up of those tiny r
ealities

  that every instant’s made of: the to and fro

  of the traffic, the wind, the flight of birds

  carrying augury only to those who desire it.

  An endless crowd hustles through these streets

  where even the cars, bumper to bumper,

  seem to have come in search of gridlock.

  Night’s neons stripe colours over the jostling throng

  and pour puddles of trumpery light on the sidewalks,

  advertising the pleasures to be found within.

  Perfumes mingled with sweat float on the air

  between bodies touching as they pass. Little cries

  are heard, and laughter and bits of sentences.

  Eyes meet and shift, look again, seeking.

  Some walk quickly on while others, furtive,

  push in through doors that let out stale music.

  Three geezers are lined up on the old folks’ balcony—

  or the balcony, rather, of the “seniors’ residence,”

  as the language of the century would have it,

  to cover up what’s really only a place to die,

  where they shut away those whom we’ll never see

  grinning from the magazines’ coloured ads.

  Sitting in white plastic armchairs, as far

  from each other as possible, without moving, and

  rigid as tomb effigies, they may be dead already.

  They’re staring into the street’s stark sunlight.

  When we cross in front of them, only their eyes

  move in their masks, and follow as we pass.

  We hear, for the first time this year,

  the long cry of the nighthawk diving into

  the clouds of bugs that swarm round the street lights.

  The room expands beyond measure with the

  flood of murmurs pouring from the open window.

  A car goes by trailing a rumbling backwash

  that fades off forever into the darkness.

  In this ocean of heat and humidity,

  we shall not sleep without dreaming,

  just as during the day we dream

  that other dream, no less chaotic,

  that’s unthinkingly called the world.

  The sun outlines the elms, the maples and

  other trees out there, blurred against the light;

  voices can be heard, engines, birds,

  and the wind stirring in the leaves.

  All this is part of evening’s approach.

  Clouds stretch a tarpaulin across the sky

  washed by the storm at afternoon’s end;

  soon it will be paling, imperceptibly,

  until broader and broader patches of shadow

  are brushed across the walls, growing heavier

  and heavier, till we see them painted over, until

  black, unrelieved, will have snatched it all away.

  This we read in a newspaper which smudges our fingers:

  cosmologists have discovered that the world

  is in accelerated expansion, or so they say,

  into infinity. Lucretius knew as much as that,

  and as little; from the fall of everything

  in every way, all is done and all undone.

  The sun in the wet grass lights up

  as many stars as the eye can see;

  a flock of starlings wheels, opens out,

  gathers again and plunges into an elm which

  instantly fills with chirping. The scent of newsprint

  mingles with the odour of damp earth.

  The boulevard runs beneath a sky painted

  in fresco with a baroque landslide of clouds.

  The alignment of the trees outlines a ship

  surmounted by a perfect arch, rounded

  above a colonnade whose capitals

  of leaves and birds are stirring in the wind.

  At the horizon, the slow rose-window

  of a pink and green dawn glorifies

  the rising of a sun so white it seems

  the spectrum must have liquified within it.

  Then all of space is washed with blue,

  cars go by, and the day has dawned.

  Try to recite the terrible names of God.

  He’s yesterday’s paper scattering in the windy street,

  and this faceless wind that creeps in everywhere;

  He’s a patch of sunlight on the grass in the park,

  and that grass ruffled by the wind; He’s a perfume,

  the floating dust, that footstep walking away;

  He’s the cement of the sidewalk and the pigeon’s

  parabola between the trees and the roofs,

  arcing unseen through the blue of the light;

  He’s the diesel smell behind a bus, those

  absent looks you meet and pass, the prismatic air.

  He’s a word not spoken, which you shall never speak.

  The man who walks at night, under an umbrella,

  lends form to the world as he spins out the thread

  of his promenade. To either side the street

  is lustrous with the colours brought out

  by the damp while, with each foot set down,

  he pronounces a silent, ongoing fiat lux.

  Each house, each tree, each passer-by,

  the traffic and the spheres of brightness

  that tremble round the street lights, are

  at once erased as his steps transport him

  onwards, into the cave encompassed by

  the darkness, the shower and his meditation.

  The sedum droops beneath its umbels which

  the October sunlight tinges with pink and grey.

  The sky, suffused with blue, is rounded

  into a dome, its base festooned with cornices.

  Crows—five? eight?—fly philosophically

  up the street, all leisurely wisdom.

  Suddenly, from an unknown source, and

  irrepressible as the shower of notes in

  a Scarlatti sonata, there wells up all the joy

  that it is possible to know. Asters

  splash the torrent of white light as it

  shifts the shadow: the world’s clock turns.

  From the right, the sun outlines the edges

  of this chair, tracing its anamorphosis

  on the wall. Your shadow sits there, also

  in anamorphosis. Your gestures, in that flat

  grey and white world, are translated to the slant,

  unless you yourself are the projection,

  gifted with volume and solidity, of that web

  of patches and lines moving on the wall’s screen.

  Unless that wall, those shadows, that sun, this chair

  and you—this surface and its projection into space—

  should open out, superfluous petals of no bouquet,

  in a point purely ideal, at the centre of nothing.

  Suppose that a gust of wind blows over the rooftops,

  a single wave in the ocean of air, in the immense

  openness of space, with no point of reference. Suppose

  that the air is folding and rolling and that it’s only

  a noise, a rustling of the ether, the sudden unwinding

  of a cable running out. There’ll be evening also,

  laid out in the ordinary street, between the houses

  made of nothing, seemingly, but a slightly denser night.

  There’ll be darkness heaped at the feet of those houses,

  and the channel of this street sunk deeper still,

  where we shall pursue our course, step by step,

  in the tides of the air and the eddies of the wind.

  In this out-of-the-way neighbourhood, near noon,

  there’s nothing but autumn under a wide-open sky.

  Patches of sunlight are redistributing

  masses in the hollow channel of the street

  under the tattered arch
of a double row of trees.

  The houses, slashed with zones of shadow,

  create colliding angles. A crow, with

  loud caws, takes possession of the world

  from the top of a totemic maple, streaked

  with straw-coloured and wine-red patches.

  The scene is set for whatever event might

  happen here, although the decor suffices.

  Each house sends up a plume of smoke which

  the wind beats back down on the roofs. In the

  distant sky, shadow heaps upon shadow.

  This is the year’s lowest point, when nothing

  seems likely to begin again, nor the cold cease

  to weigh on the mind numbed by this allegory

  that pictures its passing. But can the word

  ‘cold’ cause a shiver in he who utters it?

  And can this city of concrete, metal and brick

  be translated to metaphor? What is there

  to decipher in these streets which the snow is

  blending into space paved with greyish light?

  The window squares off our view

  of this landscape made of one angled street

  and the contrasting levels of several walls

  edged with trees plunked down, it seems,

  in the most complete disorder. It should

  be possible to render this in every detail,

  on a sheet ruled off in lines, in keeping

  with the example of the designer

  of a plate which Dürer used to illustrate

  his treatise on perspective. But it’s all

  laid out flat, with no vanishing point, on

  windowpanes that also reflect the room.

  A comic-strip sky, for some sunset ending,

  unfurls violet banners above the street,

  their contours sharp, on a ground as grey-blue

  as if poured from an inkwell. The street,

  almost empty at this hour, in this district,

  leads straight to the narrow horizon framed

  by two rows of housefronts. Two even lines

  of trees trimmed back with architectural rigour