For As Far as the Eye Can See (8 page)

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

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,