For As Far as the Eye Can See Read online

  vanish in parallel. We walk through ideal urban

  planning purged of nature and every irregularity,

  towards we know not what, blissfully ignorant

  but borne up by this perfectly oriented space.

  A contralto voice responds to a clarinet

  and we might wish the duet to last forever,

  but as soon as the record stops, we hear

  the myriad voices of the crickets through

  the mid-September night, rediscovering time

  and this rainy summer that never seems to end.

  Of these songs one listens to with all one’s soul

  drunk with memory, dazed by what exists, and

  lost between near and far, so that death,

  we hope, may seize it in all ravishment,

  which is the more beautiful? We cannot say,

  in this dreaming dusk that is all of life.

  You gaze at the window coated with black,

  and striving to describe the city’s expanse

  through such a mild early autumn night,

  you search for words that might raise up,

  from a perfectly level horizon, the lemon

  disk of a moon never seen except in painting.

  For then volumes of shadow could be created,

  with infinite space opening out between them.

  But there’s only this black, inked evenly in

  and lacking all depth, but with, here and there,

  patches of lighted windows, and the speckles

  of street lights … which everyone has already seen.

  A driver stopped at a red light

  sees the ages of life pass in front of him:

  slender, supple schoolgirls, in uniform,

  and old women alone, carrying bags,

  as well as old men, just as alone, crossing

  with slow steps. The street becomes an allegory.

  Working people pass by, a couple,

  a man walking a dog. All that’s missing,

  under a tree or in some recessed spot,

  is a grizzled reaper with a scythe, maybe brandishing

  an hourglass as well. The driver listens,

  distractedly, to the five o’clock news.

  A rowan branch looms up out of the fog

  in which all else is progressively dissolved

  like the background of a photograph when

  the zoom, focused on the central figure,

  drowns and dilutes the rest in light.

  The rowan’s vermillion clusters stand out,

  lacquered with moisture, as incredibly clear

  as if painted by Georgia O’Keeffe, although

  she would have cut even that surrounding space,

  grey on grey, where the light turns to haze,

  and the knot of branches, a copper-green mass,

  which is the single scrap of reality to be seen.

  The October light is splintering

  through the prism of the first frosts;

  since it’s freezing now at night,

  the vegetation has taken on colours

  that seem almost lacquered or varnished,

  diffracting the sunlight in the streets.

  Suddenly we realize that we’re living

  inside the universal clock, of which we

  are only a tiny cogwheel. Red is mixed

  with everything, the wind dumps it in the streets;

  we catch ourselves dragging our feet through it

  like a schoolboy whose homework isn’t done.

  A manuscript with crossings out, some books,

  a few of them open, others in stacks,

  a glass of pens, a paper cutter, scissors,

  a ruler, a notebook, several pencils,

  a pad of squared-off paper, a laptop computer,

  an ashtray, a lighter, a packet of cigarettes;

  all this would make up a still life,

  unless you added—but he’s here already—

  a man, dreaming amongst these things and

  facing an autumn landscape that fills the window,

  which would result in another recognized genre:

  the portrait of the artist in his studio.

  Patches of sunlight on the blind,

  mingled with shadows more or less dense,

  produce an effect, as in the cave,

  or on a movie screen, of a shadow of

  something that may be only a shadow

  or, as Plotinus thought, a chain

  of increasingly tattered shadows.

  The wind has cleared the sky of

  the veil of haze that was clouding it.

  We’ve raised the blind, opened the curtains

  and gaze into an illusion of blue infinity

  that stretches out and away, away, away.

  Here on this side are the call letters PA

  for Latin, and over there the letters PQ

  for Romance literature, which is to say

  for paradise: so much prose and poetry

  that a blissful eternity would not suffice

  for us to read it all, from Lucretius and Horace

  to Saint-Denys Garneau, Borges and Montale,

  from Aulus Gellius to Joubert, to Cioran, to Léautaud.

  One could just as well say Seneca, and Ponge, and Leopardi,

  Petrarch, Pessoa, Montaigne … one recites these names

  and those of Sbarbaro, Erasmus, or Marteau, giddy

  at having inhaled the inexhaustible catalogue.

  The garden’s chirping since a flock of starlings

  swooped down on the trees around it.

  There must be hundreds of them out there to form

  such a resounding orchestra, endlessly

  repetitive and full-throated, with amplitude

  variations that are hollowing out space.

  More reminiscent of Philip Glass than of Messiaen,

  it’s like a symphony with neither start

  nor finish, made up of a single chord

  sustained, layered, unfurled, as if flinging

  an immense hurrah into the whirling

  of the leaves in the autumn sunlight.

  The wind scatters leaves into the light

  while a flock of black birds passes over

  in apparent disorder, but that’s an illusion,

  since all is structure without your knowing it.

  You see the rain mixing a vortex of glimmers

  into the torrent of sunlight, and you realize

  that it’s all music, moving and alive;

  that this isn’t a picture for you to gaze at,

  languidly, at your leisure, but a great river

  sweeping you away, and that it’s this morning

  in October, the first and last in all the world.

  Your existence is not really important.

  Pensively, a cat pads off down the laneway

  between board fences enclosing small gardens,

  crumbs or metaphors for that absolute garden, the earth.

  Along cracks in the asphalt run threads of grass

  whose pattern may spell out the inconceivable

  name of God, or the shape of the world.

  Busy with matters known only to him, the cat

  sidesteps old papers, shattered glass, tin cans,

  nameless objects highlighted by the sun.

  We can’t approach him; as soon as we step forward,

  he walks calmly away, sure as he is of escaping

  in a single bound should we try to catch him.

  The fog pressing on the windows

  adds to the silence in the house.

  No car has gone by yet.

  The city seems to be sleeping the sleep

  of thousands of sleepers, each in his dream,

  in his own chaotic, private world.

  The newspaper hasn’t been delivered yet,

  the kitchen’s raw light picks out each object,

  even if
night still lingers in the corners.

  On the table, the basket of fruit is

  trying hard, without success, to look

  like the one that Caravaggio painted.

  Let’s lift our faces to this October sunlight,

  and close our eyes; at once we’ll share

  the entirely philosophical well-being of the cat

  who’s stretched out in the grass,

  unmoved that the wind around him is stirring up

  a shifting edifice of perfumes.

  Its brightness sifts down through the maple which,

  in another day or two, will have few leaves left,

  so that we’ll see the bare bones of its branches

  beneath the blue enhanced by clouds,

  like a temple built of columns only, through which

  a god might pass, what god we do not know.

  The city’s never so lovely as in the afternoon,

  between three and four, with the day lowering,

  in November. The light spreads, an ever finer

  dusting of weightlessness over the stones,

  with dim figures walking the dreaming streets

  as they sink deeper amongst tall buildings.

  Everywhere windows are lighting up. They cast

  glimmering nets that may catch a face,

  momentarily, then another, not as ghosts,

  but seizing each in his singular eternity,

  while the doorways of stores are lighting up

  under shreds of sky whence falls the night.

  All of autumn, finally, is only a sepia snapshot

  with crackled edges, in which we see

  some elms thrusting their branches’ inky

  strokes up against a troubled sky.

  All of autumn, finally, is only a pack

  of commonplaces, regrets for that which was

  and was not, a wasteland swept by the wind

  until, one morning, crossing the park, we feel

  the grass crunch underfoot; it froze overnight,

  and in the life-giving cold, in the air

  that we breathe in with delight, suddenly

  we know that winter’s light is on its way.

  Three men are tarring a roof.

  Through the icy air we see steam

  condensing round their backlit silhouettes.

  It lends their movements that solemnity

  produced in the movies by slow motion.

  The winter sun climbs so imperceptibly

  that time seems to have stopped.

  We hear their voices when their work

  is more difficult, but mostly they’re silent

  and we hear only hammer blows

  ringing the sky’s colossal bell

  where the white light spreads and grows.

  All is given at every instant in the space that

  unfolds for the glance forever unwearied

  of seeing what there is to see. One can begin

  anywhere and follow the tremors of the light

  beneath the sky’s ever-present vault

  where a cloud of birds is wheeling.

  The wind shakes the shadows on the walls

  still holding day’s glow. Time does not pass.

  It has never passed, since Achilles never does

  catch up with the tortoise, since we never see but

  that which is painted before our eyes: this street,

  this rustle of sunlight blending into the air.

  Through the rain, the leafless rowan tree

  seems as if painted in stipples

  that hint at its brownish-black lines.

  The old masters knew how

  to apply such touches, by means of which

  reality might be recognized.

  To left and right and out in front,

  we see street lights and their reflections,

  a sequence of patches the eye follows

  in their random distribution through a space

  furnished with masses that are sometimes

  objects, and sometimes shadows.

  The bread bag lies on the kitchen counter,

  with the bread beside it, under the white light

  that casts a round gleam on the tomatoes.

  To the right, they’re flanked by green patches of basil,

  to the left, we see an onion, the salt shaker,

  the pepper mill, and a bottle of oil.

  This is almost a recipe, with the knife

  beside the cutting board. On the table,

  the basket of apples and plums makes up

  a more usual design in yellow, red and blue,

  although we are no less beguiled

  by the same virtues of the frugal and the familiar.

  A banner of clouds, the rising sun,

  the point of view from which we look (a height

  that lays the city out in panorama)

  conspire to cloak the horizon in a canvas

  painted with mountains we never knew were there,

  like an Andean cordillera or the Himalayas,

  of no substance other than the air, the damp,

  the dawn brushing the rooftops. In the distance,

  their lack of reality is not obvious to the eye

  and we’re inspired with a longing to deny

  that these roofs and streets are realer, made of

  harder brick and concrete than that veil of vapour.

  All seems at a standstill in this quiet neighbourhood.

  It could be Thursday morning, or the afternoon

  of any other day. One checks one’s watch. Outside

  the grocery, an old woman sets down a bag of provisions

  and looks at the snow that’s blurring the light, a

  prismatic dust falling from a sky where hangs

  a sun that we can stare straight into.

  Could we gaze at death like that, unblinking? Maybe,

  if it was just as veiled and if it opened out

  like this snow-softened day, like this space

  where chimney smoke lifts and thins, like this street.

  The woman collects her bag and crosses with slow steps.

  Night has settled its simplest scene at the window;

  red beacons from the radio tower flash the message

  that the dark stretching out through the upper air

  is an area of space that features solid objects,

  into which one may crash, should one be a plane,

  a bird, or an angel, and stray into this space.

  Lower down, brick walls lit up by street lights

  present a curtain cut through by angles and pierced

  with windows in asymmetrical distribution.

  Sometimes lamps are lit there and if, as here,

  the curtains are not drawn, they offer the view

  of a monad, enclosed between walls and a ceiling.

  Northern birds are almost always in

  the colours of wood, their feathers resembling

  nothing so much as shades of bark.

  The cardinal’s an exception, so dazzling

  you’d think him dreamt up by a hobbyist god

  or drawn by a child who’s just been given

  coloured crayons and sheets of plain white

  paper; he puts in a red patch, adds

  a squiggle for the ruff, another for the rather

  jaunty tail, and the buttery point of the beak

  planted in the black mask. Then he crumples

  the scrawl as fast as the bird blurs into the air.

  The trees lift up the lightweight net

  of their leafless crowns to the cloudy sky

  that encompasses all beneath its arch.

  There streams from it an even light, giving

  all things their true colours; lacking the shadow

  of darker tones to enhance the contrast

  of their faces turned to the brightness,

  this day swims all in the same waters, r
ising

  and falling all together, all at the same time.

  And what at first one takes for silence

  is revealed as music, in such perfect measure

  that we breathe to its rhythm, attuned to the whole.

  Seize this winter day, under its demure and

  fading sky, and this balmy-seeming air,

  so warm is the sun on the grass in the park.

  It should be covered by now. Only the snow

  should smooth the sweep, which would

  then be just as you picture nothingness:

  devoid of qualities, and tainting even

  the possibility that there may exist

  the irreplaceable paradise of a single thing,

  and one thing only. Do not indulge in imagining

  a whiteness such as might bestow a face

  on disappearance. That would be wrong.

  The poet stepped up to the microphone

  in front of the few people making up

  the small audience that had come to hear him read.

  In the bookstore window, before going in,

  he’d seen his little book beneath a notice

  which said “Sunday Poetry Readings.”

  He took a swallow of water, smiled quickly,

  leafed through his book and hesitated to read the poem

  that he’d nonetheless chosen when preparing.

  He blurted out some words of explanation,

  put his hand in his pocket, and then a different voice

  was heard, which was and was not his own.

  So much softness is a presage of snow;

  the day has closed in, the air taken on

  a scent of wood and of damp stone.

  All seems to be waiting, motionless—

  the houses, people in the street, traffic—

  all displays itself, even the shadows.

  We hear the cawing of a crow

  and search for him in vain through

  the fine network of small branches.

  Then the clouds release, from zenith

  to horizon, a downy light which

  resolves itself, slowly, into flakes.