For As Far as the Eye Can See (2 page)

The stretch of roadway is covered in dust

with, here and there, some patches of ice.

It all seems hard and tight. How many can

be out at this late hour, and in such cold?

Only those few whose task it is:

policemen, ambulance and taxi drivers,

and others with nowhere to go, to be seen,

motionless, in the recesses of buildings.

We hear the cries of seagulls, which give

the city an ocean-front air, such a long

long way from the sea. Streaky clouds roll

through the blue expanse of foamy crests.

Missing are the whiff of iodine, the scent of seaweed,

but the wind's blowing from the northwest

insistently. If it were to rain, all this

would take on a thick layer of humidity

which would make the difference. We'd close

our eyes, we'd draw in deep breaths,

and that would do it; turning to face

the wind, we'd think we smelt the open sea.

At times there's a glimpse, down the channel of a street,

and wedged between two rows of houses,

of a bit of the river, like a fragment of sky

broken off and fallen out there below the horizon.

Some mornings, there's a lancing glint

or fiery gleam where the daylight's reflected

in its blazing mirror. It might kindle its flame

in anyone lost from afar to its contemplation,

but we do not stop for that; one glance

is enough to light up the heart, and those

whom we meet, a few steps farther along,

will not know where this joy comes from.

The old man stares at a fixed point in the midst

of space, where the rest of us see nothing.

The valley rolls to the foot of the nearby hill

which the autumn climbs in stages, a view we praise,

predictably, year after year. We're right, just the

same, to applaud all these yellows, these reds and

pinks contrasted with the pines' green, we're right

to come all this way to marvel. Above the grass

that looks almost painted and varnished, we seem to see

the air's transparency, washed by the wind last night.

Abruptly, the old man turns his back on

what he alone has seen, that we can never know.

Patches of light punctuate the landscape:

street lights, traffic signals, neon signs,

shop windows, reflections. Night envelops all of space:

housefronts engulfed in the dark, intersections

looking like islands, the air that seems

laden with soot. Above the buildings floats

a narrow crescent moon and a few stars stray

in the smoky sky's immensity.

Taxis drive slowly past, and other cars which

seem to be going nowhere, coming from nowhere.

A man sets down a vague bag of stuff in the doorway

of a shop, and stretches out in his weariness.

We walked along the river's edge to see

the night streaming, time rushing past

between the shores drowned in darkness.

The wind flowed, the air flowed,

the black that was all the immensity

of space flowed from every side.

We heard only the water, and felt as if

the whole of the dark was enlarging,

rising like a fountain and pouring back

into itself, into the redundant blackness,

into the rippling air, the fluid night and

into the river lashed with reflections.

A sphere of silence enfolds all

these stores we're walking past, crossing

by turns through blocks of shadow and puddles

of brightness falling from street lights

and shop windows. It's as if the air were filling

with vague rustlings, with fleeting

movements arising from nothing,

from whisperings. The signs blink yellow, pink,

and purple. The eyes of the mannequins

stare into infinity; it's a point somewhere

out there in space. They've been posed in

deliberately banal tableaux vivants.

Nothing is happening in the expanse

of blue, so perfectly blue, that has

stretched its canvas above the streets,

nothing but the event of the light as it

fades towards the horizon, diffusing

into a hemisphere without contours,

built up out of nothing. No sooner does one try

to focus on one point than the eye, lacking

an object, seeking in vain for something

to fix on, at once shifts back down

towards the broken line of buildings,

as if to rest against a parapet.

Night blurs the garden, opening it out

into a space through which one searches

for the geometry of the constellations,

as if some pedagogical heaven were

going to reproduce the illustrations from

an astronomy manual for amateurs.

But the eye cannot distinguish the points

that the mind knows are stars from

those other patches of light projected

by the windows of the waking down there,

twinkling at the rim of the horizon,

out beyond the formless expanse.

Here on this side, pink faces smile

with all their rows of perfect white teeth

from under helmets of blond hair.

Across from them, bloodied bodies are seen,

crowds in black and white brandishing

placards, and refugees lugging bundles.

Then there's a tank, a missile, an explosion,

or the head of a prime minister. A little to the side:

breasts and buttocks. Elsewhere: cars,

pastoral landscapes and wild animals.

Magazine covers establish the truth of

this world, by categories, for all tastes.

We see rising ranks of roofs, a framework

of branches which the late spring

has not yet edged with leaves,

the criss-crossing of the telephone wires,

some patches of snow … a whitish sky

raises its rampart up behind as in

those naïve paintings which remain superbly

unaware of the techniques of perspective.

We see chimneys outlined against

a pale sun and spills of undecided

shadow. We see the air's transparency,

and the hazy dusting of the light.

The day draws down. It's as if the sky

were emptying out and space folding up,

as if the light were crumbling away like

plaster that has never been painted,

that's neither white nor grey and

that's casting an overlay of damp.

Seize this hour, or rather this instant,

this passage rather, from grey to blue-black,

as if everything were hollowing out; make

haste to see this, which you will see once only.

Night wafts through the air, which seems

suddenly made of some thick substance.

Just outside the window, a redpoll

perches on a wire, preens for an instant

then vanishes. Sparrows, raccoons,

insects and spiders and squirrels from

the miscellaneous ark of our flood

haunt our streets, gardens and alleys,

although theirs is not the world we know,

our houses playing the role, no doubt,

of hollow rocks we come bounding out of,

dangerous animals whom it's best to flee;

as soon as we appear, they all fly off, scurry,

scarper, melt into the air, the earth and the walls.

Silence rounds itself over this landscape

formed of a patch of pale wall, a hedge,

a rivulet of grass and a few trees.

Windows stand out as yellow rectangles.

The night rises up. It's as if we could hear

the shadows spreading, little by little overtaking

the expanse studded with street lights.

Soon nothing will be seen but a rampart

of bricked-up blackness, compact and flawless.

Is this the disorder of a world's end?

The air carries stale perfumes which we quaff down

as if drinking swallows of nothingness.

All the light is radiating from the lemons

in the fruit bowl in the middle of the table,

which some avocadoes, pears and kiwis

enhance with green, copper and velvet patches.

Light falling from the window finds focus there,

everything arranged round this ideal centre:

the china cabinet, the buffet, the empty chairs,

solid walnut pieces, polished, almost black,

striped with reflections. The newspaper and the mail

are white and light-brown rectangular

patches, tossed casually on the corner, where

the cat has come and stretched out on them.

For all that, he's not so badly dressed,

and he's shaved this morning, this man

holding out his cap in the bus shelter.

He's mumbling a few inaudible words,

knowing that these people, whether they give or not,

have no wish to hear what he has to say.

All he needs is to draw their attention,

catch their eye and refuse to look away.

An old woman rummages in her handbag

and places a folded banknote in his cap.

Immediately he stuffs it into his pocket,

leaving only small change, which he jingles.

The light can be seen suspending

a hazy prismatic fog above

a long vista of gardens and

through a tracery of branches

that a late spring has held for

a month too long in winter nudity.

Its stippled shimmering lends truth

to the painting of Seurat; in a rosy,

bluish, violet dust, the luminance

clothes all these things with a

double that reveals, in philosophical

heaven, their shapes.

A fat cumulus cloud floats on a sea of blue;

it might be a sky by Poussin. It's much like this

that we imagine paradise—as an eiderdown

for us to roll ourselves up in while watching

all the earth go by below: rivers, valleys,

mountains and cities, and the oceans

with their toy boats, the forests, the animals

on the savanna or the tundra, better

than on television or at the movies, with

all the labours, the games, puerile and secretive,

of irreplaceable little men, each pursuing

affairs known only to himself.

We walk through streets we know

or used to know … the eye

collides with walls that were not here

when first we ventured out,

unwittingly, into this labyrinth;

a vacant lot which now we see only

in recollection, was over there,

where a tower of blue glass rises, a cube

of hardened sky. But a parking lot

offers an opening that lets us see,

at afternoon's end, the orb of a sun

which we are pleased to recognize.

In eight or nine hundred paces, we've passed

a dozen beggars, whom we have pretended

not to see. Farther along, a pierrot is sitting

on a folding chair in the middle of the sidewalk,

preparing his show—there's no way past him.

In his left hand he's holding a pocket mirror