For As Far as the Eye Can See Read online

  The waning moon above the fir tree

  seems to overhang a landscape that bears

  the name only because we have given it.

  Landscape? The snow rounds off rooflines,

  the snow does away with gardens, the snow

  makes a halo round that moon. Landscape?

  None of this resembles anything the word evokes.

  This is nothing but a construct of faint marks:

  some brick walls without windows,

  the bluish humps and hollows in the snow,

  a street light shining on nothing but branches

  outlined with frost, and white everywhere.

  We take another look at our invitation; yes,

  this is the place. Through the windows, in fact,

  we see small groups of people talking.

  As soon as we’re through the door, we’re swallowed

  up in a blur of babble. It’s obvious no one

  can hear anything at all. But that doesn’t matter.

  Being here is enough, being seen here is enough.

  With a look, with a nod of our heads, we greet

  those who wish us to see that they’re here as well.

  A voice calls for silence, there’ll be a short speech;

  the publisher greets the authors, who smile, and then

  the din of voices resumes. This is a book launch.

  The movement from night to day

  and from day to night cannot,

  in winter, be called twilight;

  that should be a grander spectacle

  than this imperceptible passage

  from dark grey to light grey,

  or from blinding blue-white

  to the greyish white still giving off,

  in full dark, a shadow of brightness.

  All melts away with the hyperbolic restraint

  heard in the playing of Glenn Gould

  in his last recordings.

  The junction of two zones of colour

  draws a conceptual line, understood as

  the meeting of two walls, at right angles.

  At the bottom, an isoceles triangle suggests

  the fictional depth of a space

  made up entirely of patches.

  On a trapezoid that stands for a table,

  teardrops, circles and ovals are fruit

  of a flavour which no one will taste

  and flowers without perfume. A bee

  that does not buzz forever approaches a rose

  whose petals fall in dribbles of pigment.

  A wave or tongue of snow laps over the edge

  of the roof, which metamorphoses into white china

  on which the insect one has turned into, crawls,

  then flies off into open space, just as white.

  Such was the dream or its setting. But one does not know

  if the cat, perhaps a stuffed toy, that was sitting

  at the window, or if the trial, which was about to begin

  in a vacant lot at the moment when one awoke,

  were connected in a linkage of cause and effect.

  Or rather, one is sure of it; it all held together,

  although it all crumbles very rapidly

  as the familiar room resumes its shape.

  Consider the disorder of your life

  in the clutter on this table:

  reports, minutes of meetings, agendas,

  an ashtray, The Tusculanes, some pens,

  a writing pad … the result is a collage

  rather than a vanitas; what’s missing is a skull,

  an overturned goblet, an hourglass or a watch.

  At the window, the sun’s painting on the pane

  in imitation of the illusion of depth

  created by perspective, a landscape of levels

  (streets, snow, roofs, the bluish air) into whose

  vanishing you allow your eye to wander.

  How can the moon, instead of a cardboard

  cut-out, be an astral whiteness lighting up

  the winter night like a different sort of day?

  In the street, the snow scatters stars

  through which we walk, which we can touch,

  while from the windows separate worlds

  shine out: the cosmos of each house

  and of each partitioned room.

  Snow covers the street and gardens

  left to the wind that’s hollowing out space.

  The snow is impure, grey and shadowy;

  lewdly, it stretches out beneath the moon.

  Vertical strokes map out the space

  and provide us with depth perception:

  some chimneys, some trees and poles,

  the wires stretching between them, the edges

  of buildings enhanced by the sunlight

  and framing a broken horizon line.

  A swath of blue takes all the upper part.

  A flagpole with its flag stretched out

  lets us know it’s windy, while the progress

  of shadows marks the passage of the hours,

  which a painter might render by varying

  the angle of the sun, if he wanted to show it all.

  The earth reappears as it was when we left it

  at the end of autumn in the garden

  which the snow was about to cover up.

  We hesitate to walk there since every step

  would leave a print pressed into the mud

  where soon the grass will be springing up.

  In a scant square metre, where archipelagos

  of ice are pretending to be continents, we

  observe the outline of another possible world,

  with other seas and other rivers which

  would need names, and which we might inhabit

  as we do this one, under the same sun.

  High above the cornices and chimneys

  springtime’s unfurling a sky of streaky

  clouds splashed with the whole spectrum.

  We’ve just passed the equinox, and walk

  down the widened street towards the calm days

  of the solstice, towards the schoolboys’ sun.

  A puddle left behind by March picks up

  in pink and green the space the sunrise

  is repainting earlier and earlier every day.

  And in this mirror we can almost see,

  between the cars misted with dew,

  islands, and golden domes, and towers.

  A wash of sunlight tints a concrete wall

  uninterrupted by any window, any outcrop.

  It can’t be said that the sun colours it,

  so delicate is its hue, it’s hardly noticeable,

  but at last we see it, this wall we’ve never looked at,

  even if we walk right past it every day.

  Later, we’ll think back to its loveliness,

  and the antique splendour that it raises up,

  pink and peach, like an Etruscan tombstone in Umbria,

  upon which we might decipher an epitaph—

  because we’ve walked through a park where the snow

  is flooded with the same ochre-tinted sunlight.

  It’s simply seeing what’s in front of our eyes,

  including the vanishing or collapse of everything

  on every side: this theatre which we find

  before us and around us, through which we walk,

  tipping the horizon and turning the houses,

  the walls, the trees, the grass and the street.

  At every instant, it’s all rearranged to allow

  a complete event to take place; the air is painted

  with sunlight, with damp, with dust; then

  walls divide the space where a public bench

  is placed, or a bus stop, or some signs, and

  passers-by step in at once to play their roles.

  The crown of an elm rises into the night like a big

  broccoli; we see lawns perfumed
with pesticides

  under a half-moon that looks like a bitten cookie

  hanging above the lines of streets; it’s summer

  in this city where, at this season, living is so sweet.

  We hear lawn sprinklers, nighthawks and,

  from a house converted to a Baptist chapel,

  cries, because there’s a service and the faithful

  are speaking in tongues, or the Holy Ghost through them.

  The street lights punctuate the humid darkness

  with a double line of suspension points …

  over that way are other streets, all just the same.

  Between the piers a stretch of quiet water

  resembles plaster on the point of setting

  or lead on the point of melting.

  Barges labour past, leaving wakes

  that seem almost like furrows

  in a soaked soil at the end of autumn.

  Twilight touches them with golden flecks

  which mirror and fragment a sky that

  might have been painted by Claude, or by Turner.

  Above the rampart of the buildings

  that block the nearer view, domes, towers

  and spires melt into the vanishing sun.

  Children’s cries rise from the garden,

  an outpouring of joy such that it verges

  on grief, the kind of laughter that might melt

  into tears for nothing or very little, so

  close does the pure joy of living come

  to a sorrow without name or reason.

  In the green, green grass, a ball

  becomes a second sun, to be captured,

  under the enormous sky where big

  bellying clouds parade, and birds,

  and a plane that’s another bird

  to be imitated, running, with outstretched arms.

  The reader who’s lifted his eyes from his book

  perceives the sky above as the true ocean,

  the immense expanse of blue enclosing

  the whole earth, at whose end we might tumble

  out of everything, should we ever find that end.

  An enormous white cloud appears as

  the crest of foam on a wave; it breaks and

  streams in tatters while a pair of gulls fly through

  the hollow space where blue ebbs and flows.

  Before picking up the thread of the sentence

  where he left off, this reader will have scanned

  a summer afternoon’s supreme iambic.

  That’s his cry we hear: tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet …

  A cardinal’s proclaiming his possession

  of the street. There’s no need to search for long

  to catch sight of the scarlet patch he makes

  at the top of an aspen; he’s turned towards

  the river, which we see at the foot of the slope,

  over a factory district that the eight o’clock

  sunlight is slathering, for the moment,

  with the Arcadian softness of Claude.

  As far as the horizon crenellated with towers

  stretches a zone of rail lines and vacant lots:

  his domain, soon to be buzzing with insects.

  Ahead, always ahead, arises the day, the night,

  the evening and, we imagine without proof,

  that it’s the same behind, that from this whole

  a concave space is formed, within whose centre,

  under a perfect dome, we settle in, arranging

  the streets and their people all around us.

  But it’s never more than a screen, set on the retina,

  with all the rest painted in. Quick as we turn around,

  we never glimpse the nothingness that sinks away behind,

  and which no mirror, a screen if ever was, can show.

  Between the buildings the people press on, each one

  pushing his world ahead, without looking back.

  The stubborn bass of the crickets endlessly repeats

  four notes that we hear through the humid night

  at August’s end, trying in vain to sleep. We listen

  to the few cars trailing a rumble that swells,

  then fades away, as a counterpoint of nighthawks’

  cries enters in, or a distant siren, or footsteps,

  or a breath in the trees, or the curtains rustling.

  We hear other sounds too, confused and vague,

  dreamt up in the slight delirium that arises always

  from insomnia, but the true murmur of the world,

  should one heed, even a little, its glorious orchestration,

  at once covers over their too predictible monotony.

  The rain arrives, familiar, expected, in an act

  so close we touch the space that it enshrouds.

  It descends like memory, green and grey,

  forest, sea and street mingled in the cold light

  that adorns each object with fresh details;

  it comes nearer, repetitive, inexorable

  as childhood was, with a rustling like the curtain

  one draws at evening to enclose the room

  and its swarm of dreams; it murmurs

  a single word, repeated indefinitely, that

  we cannot quite grasp, that we divine

  or foresee, which is the secret name of time.

  Sitting on the ground by the trash can, he stinks up

  the subway entrance, calling out in confusion

  to people passing, who know where they’re going.

  No one listens to his drunken, drugged-out

  monologue—who could?—and no one

  spares more than a sidelong glance for his

  fumbling gestures, his pitiable efforts

  to struggle to his feet, the looks he casts

  at the incomprehensible mess around him.

  He’s a tangle of misery, a child of the slime,

  made in the shape and image of their God, and

  the police will shortly come and collect him.

  As soon as the blind is raised, on which

  only whitish rectangles were outlined

  by the crosspieces, the landscape unfolds:

  trees appear, the street, some zones of blue;

  over the roadway is a tracery of branches

  with the shadows of birds flying through.

  Plotinus believed the eye sees only images

  derived from inconceivable archetypes, but

  the glance by instinct shuns the burning sun.

  In the bathroom, when from the mirror’s depths

  we see a stranger looking out at us, we understand

  that we’re nothing but a knot, coming undone.

  There’s no better dancer than the aspen leaf,

  its supple stalks the longest, the slenderest of the legs

  to flicker in the green majesty of high summer’s light.

  From a distance, perhaps at the far end of a field,

  an aspen looks to be fluttering thousands of flags,

  like a strip-mall lot on a suburban boulevard

  amongst expressways, motels, garbage dumps and lawns.

  But that’s beside the point, and a slight effort will

  help us recover some commonplaces of the poetic tradition

  such as “lamp—the aspen is the lamp of the solstice,” etc.

  or “a vertical river, a shower of reflections, a standing fire,” etc.

  But we prefer “dancer” or better still, “the quaking aspen leaf.”

  In the light of eight o’clock in the morning,

  at the bus stop, people are waiting, lost

  in thought and gazing at the sunlight

  that washes down over the housefronts

  on the other side of the street, and the cars

  that go by, stop for the red light, and move on.

  A woman clutches her bag under her elbow;

  a teenager’s beating time to the noises


  heard crackling out of his Walkman;

  a man’s reading a newspaper and worrying

  about rumours of war, to take place, it is thought,

  a long way from here, in the evening, on television.

  The blind’s pallor hints at a clear sky.

  It’s never so blue, one never sees it so well

  as at this season, through the trees’ bare bones,

  the light shining past unhindered by leaves,

  of which there remain just enough to prick out

  space with a stippling of red and yellow patches.

  You do not raise this blind, not wanting the real landscape

  (but what is real?) to cancel immediately

  the one you are inventing. Then you give in …

  and at once there unfolds, vast, motionless and blue,

  the vista of the light, but which could not be painted

  without an edging of shadows, and there are none.

  What we see first is a stretch of rumpled clouds.

  There’s no white-albed angel passing through

  amongst the birds, and therefore none is seen.

  Lowering our eyes, we see the brick houses,

  each at the end of its garden, covered

  with the leaves no longer seen on the trees.

  As for the trees, what we see are their branches;

  they’re joined to the upper parts of the trunks

  by their branchings, appropriately named.

  One might add the chimneys and the telephone wires,

  but we shall not mention the wind; one does not see

  the wind, and we shall speak only of what is seen.

  We take a fresh look at the bark of the trees

  now that the parasol of leaves no longer blocks

  the light that’s streaming down their trunks.

  Under the sky’s ruins, a colonnade has arisen

  along the streets, and it leads forever

  into the white dusk of November’s end.

  This is no temple, nor has it been deserted

  by any gods who never passed here.

  This is a neighbourhood with shops