For As Far as the Eye Can See Read online

  whose windows offer fruit, or clothing; people

  come and go; the air carries scents of pepper,

  of steam, gasoline, moisture and coffee.

  The window lets in the city’s sounds

  from near to far: hammer blows,

  heavy machinery, sirens? some Varèse.

  The expressway’s far-off rumble stands

  for silence, so little do we hear it. In the garden,

  the birds are improvising on Messiaen.

  Amongst the books, in a room organized

  for solitary work, a reader is listening

  to the buzzing of bees in the Latin of Petrarch:

  “De remediis utriusque fortunae?” Antidotes

  against the blows, either baneful or boastful,

  of blind Lady Luck, whom no one escapes.

  He was about to open that door, step into that room

  where at last all would be revealed—when the reader

  closes the book, putting off until later the rest

  of the novel he’s spent some hours with. At once

  the characters make their exit, and a different,

  familiar room rises up again before his eyes.

  There’s an armchair, a table, some other books,

  and a jumble of all the things he recognizes:

  a lamp, a sofa, a glass and a window.

  These form a different dream, that seems real, perhaps,

  only by a different convention. But who’s dreaming now,

  who’s dreaming him, holding the closed book in his hands?

  Strolling through the November dusk, at the end

  of an endless afternoon, which is ending only,

  is a chance to indulge in matchless delights.

  It’s not yet night; the brightness lingers

  under a sky cemented above the streets and

  over housefronts vanishing towards the horizon.

  It’s not day either; a grey and black fog

  wafts up before our eyes as we gaze along

  the row of street lights, lit up by four o’clock.

  The stores are lighted; each window offers

  a summary of the universe, and we stop to look,

  with no purpose other than to savour time.

  A few maples present an asymmetrical colonnade

  unlike anything ever seen in Classical antiquity.

  They’re so much more ancient, one might declare

  them entirely new, bathed in the light of beginnings.

  But still … this is only a weekday morning

  in the park that we cross on our way to the subway

  and the noises of traffic will not let us behold

  in this stretch of municipal grass the locus amœnus

  of The Bucolics, or take ourselves for Tityrus,

  even if, at the path’s end, philosophically, a man

  out of work is crumbling a bun into a pigeon ballet,

  and eight in the morning is a point in eternity too.

  Sunlight casts a spray of slender branchings,

  crystals of light, into space as it dips and sways,

  delicately, then opens out at the intersection.

  One imagines oneself in panorama, set like

  an exclamation point at the centre of the colours

  as in Mirò—personage and point of view—

  since one’s watching oneself explore the stretch

  that the eye invents on all sides. Then there

  chimes in, like a symphony in a single chord,

  the harpsichord of the starlings, the orchestra

  of the traffic, and the perfumes, and the keen,

  subtle joy sown by the shimmering brightness.

  The houses leaning up against each other

  offer a connected frontage of window rhythms

  in the brick surfaces softened by the fog.

  Sparrows clinging in the leafless trees

  are fruit that no hand will gather; they

  fly up and scatter as the stroller passes.

  All he wants is to saunter down the slope of time,

  spending at his leisure this afternoon of

  a December so mild that everyone’s amazed,

  but as soon as he reaches the avenue, he’ll act like

  the rest, goaded by work and rushing from one line

  to the next in the squares of their day planners.

  “I realize I’ve got nothing to complain about … ”

  she says to the friend beside her

  as we pass them on the sidewalk.

  She’s a woman in the street, plumpish, ordinary

  no doubt, although we had only a glimpse of her

  and will never know or want to know more.

  It’s enough to stroll in the light, in the midst

  of all that it enfolds in its softness,

  it’s enough to be oneself a single note

  and nothing more, in the concert created

  by all these things, in this street, at this hour,

  to have nothing really to complain about.

  He walks slowly, limping, because his boots are

  too big and blister his heels, and because he’s tramped

  for so long in the street like this, not knowing where.

  He sees people stepping aside to avoid him, he guesses

  they’re turning to look as he passes, exclaiming at

  the wake of stink that he himself no longer smells.

  In both hands he’s toting torn plastic bags that he’ll

  have to replace tomorrow if the trash can he’s planning

  to rummage in provides no others. He no longer remembers

  not having plodded, lugging these worthless things,

  through streets become one endless street, in the din,

  the throng, the cold, the sun, the wind and the traffic.

  The crow swoops and dips, wings outspread

  under the misty sky. There have to be clouds,

  between two seasons, before he’ll appear.

  He hangs in the air, seems to fall back,

  catches himself and alights at the top of a maple,

  where he sways, slowly and majestically.

  The world around is made all of wind and cold,

  out of the immense conch shell of space, the whole

  laid out below, where he deigns to look down.

  He inspects the horizon, of which he takes

  possession with loud caws, then flies off

  into the thickening mist, and is gone.

  As soon as we step out, the cold stings.

  The street seems hardened or tightened.

  Space recedes in shrunken perspectives.

  Instinct impels us, or habit, to pull in our heads,

  and hunch our shoulders, to gather ourselves

  together and offer less hold to the glacial air.

  We hear nothing but the crunch of our footsteps.

  An occasional car passes, underscoring

  the perfect silence we’re listening to.

  Hard to explain what we’re doing outdoors

  in this weather, at this hour, absolutely outdoors,

  and there’s no one to ask the question.

  In the vastness of a hospital parking lot (this is indeed what

  the moon would be like, were we on it, quintessential suburb,

  suburb of the earth), a crow alights on a lamppost

  and loudly salutes the ten-thirty sunlight in its multiple

  reflections on the hoods, the bumpers and the chrome.

  Near the emergency entrance, ambulance attendants

  smoke and gossip in the chilly air. They survey

  the steppe of cars that they’ve seen so often.

  A few patients shepherded by family, old people

  or walking like old people, shuffle very slowly away

  under the monumental sky. An ambulance wheels in,

  lights whirling and flashing. The crow flies off.


  You’ve got to tear up these drafts you’ve copied,

  which are nothing now but the sum of the errors

  and approximations that you’ve tried to correct,

  although it’s not without pleasure that you view the design

  of crossings out, arrows, circlings, additions, scrawls

  of blue or red or black ink, plus some underlinings

  you don’t remember making. For what purpose

  do you study your mind’s mess here, the random

  chance that you tried to win—in vain, don’t you see?

  You were hoping for one true word that’s neither here,

  nor in those clean copies you slide into a folder and—

  in their place—the just-about of your abilities.

  I have built up a monument as fragile as the grass,

  as unstable as the daylight, as fleeting as the air, and

  as fluid as the rain we see running in the streets.

  I’ve consigned it to paper that will dry, and

  which may burn, or be splotched by the damp

  with a bloom of pink, or green, or grey mildew,

  and give off a pungent earthy odour. I’ve worked

  in the transient substance of a tongue that will

  cease to be spoken, sooner or later, or be pronounced

  some other way, forming other words to convey

  other thoughts. I’ve pledged it to the oblivion certain

  to enfold all that this day bathes in its sweetness.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Robert Melançon is one of Quebec’s most original poets. He won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his collection Blind Painting and shared the Governor General’s Award for Translation with Charlotte Melançon for their French version of A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll. A long-time translator of Canadian poet Earle Birney, Melançon has been the poetry columnist for the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir and the Radio-Canada program En Toutes Lettres. He lives in North Hatley, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Judith Cowan has translated the works of a wide range of Québecois poets, including books by Gérald Godin and Yves Préfontaine. She won the Governor General’s Award for Mirabel, her translation of Pierre Nepveu’s Lignes aériennes. The author of two collections of short stories, More Than Life Itself and Gambler’s Fallacy, she taught for many years at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, and lives in Trois-Rivières, Quebec.