For As Far as the Eye Can See (4 page)

if it's raining or not. Before reaching street level,

daylight here takes on the colour of the walls,

which seem stuccoed with dust and ash.

Once past the bend, reached with slow steps

because we're climbing a fairly steep slope,

and because this stern setting invites meditation,

we notice, through a vertical slit, the place

where a lake of luminescence quivers, source of

that rivulet of daylight we were following.

Lakes of blue are displayed between the treetops,

as calm as if they'd been painted,

as saturated as if they'd been squeezed

straight out of a new tube of acrylic onto

the sky's canvas, iridescent in the sun

and woven of air, light and water vapour.

It's no small feat, such chromatic purity,

at once transparent and stony as a
trompe-l'oeil

on the vault of a baroque church, but one would

search in vain through this real, this empty sky,

for a saint's apotheosis, accompanied by the

swish of wings from a troupe of cherubim.

A truck rolls across the intersection

trailing behind it a bluish plume

through the nine o'clock light.

Wandering in the cool and limpid air

we see movements bereft of meaning;

they might be splinters of space,

or shards of light tumbling from the roofs,

as if traced by a cubist painter

between those houses, had he painted

this street, at this time of day,

in the newness of a world restored

to the paradise of its first names.

Between the trees, over by the cinema, we catch

sight of the sun setting a slow fire whose gleam,

beyond the park, tinges the facing houses.

After having gazed at its metallic splendour

through the gap the expressway opens to the river

(stream of mercury, haze of copper, fume of bronze),

we'll find its embers once again on a cornice

in a street the daylight won't have reached and

where it shows itself, furtively, only at noon.

For the moment we're strolling an avenue of maples,

like the country setting for some hermitage,

all golden, and scuffing our feet in the leaves.

A whorl in the third windowpane is

bending the landscape. Move your head and

at once the roof's edge pinches and folds,

at once the brick wall takes on

the pliancy of cloth, wrinkling and stretching.

And where does this game lead?

A simple bubble in a sheet of glass and

all you thought so solid is making a face.

To what serves mortal beauty?
Hopkins asked,

and answered, too quickly, that it kindles

in man's mind the desire for what exists.

But look: it's nothing but a fold, or a knot.

A straight line between two fields of blue

is enough to make a seascape, minimalist,

but a seascape nonetheless if the observer,

whom one sees from behind as in Friedrich, adds

a little good will. Missing was the movement

of waves at the bottom, always the bottom, fringed

with the foam we've just added. With that come the growl

of the undertow, the cold air, salty, seaweed-scented,

the wind blowing from offshore, the scumbling

of the light in the heaving prism of the swells,

and this pallor in the sky, not so blue after all

when filtered through the spray of spindrift in the air.

The sun's taking pictures of the trees,

in black and white, on the sidewalk.

Projected on the ground and the walls

are copies of it all, swayed by the wind

and extinguished by the slightest cloud.

Thus there's a double lying beside you

whom you never glance at unless it's his snaking

shadow while you climb a few steps,

or else when a melancholy mood

reminds you that soon you'll be laid out

between his insubstantial arms

in an unending clasp.

“The bronze rain …” “No, it's a haze.”

“The sun's bronze haze is announcing

that soon we'll be plunged into cold darkness.”

“Not so fast—there's a choir of starlings

chirping in polyphony.” “How can there be so many

of them (supposing there are) without our seeing them?”

“Never mind, we do hear them, and sometimes

too we hear the squeaking pully of a solo blue jay.”

Close to the sun-warmed brick of the wall,

one feels a philosophical well-being, not

really inexpressible but certainly very sweet.

“It's not going to last, this artificial eternity.”

In spite of the cars, the rain can be heard

pattering on the leaves and the roadway

in this mere murmur, devoid of melody,

or rather as a silence made audible.

The rain has no beginning. It seems

all at once to have been there forever

in a hidden fold of time. The passer-by

who's taken refuge in the doorway of a store,

looks out and around into blurred space,

slowly, as if seeking a glimpse of himself,

shadow of a shadow, shadow amongst shadows,

in some existence other than this dream.

Eighteen tomatoes have been set out to ripen

on the window ledge; the result is a

still life that could be painted.

The sunlight adds a rounded white

highlight to each of them, which is

balanced by a little pedestal of shadow.

Beyond the pane, a hedge plaits

a green tracery that provides a backdrop

blurred with reflections, over which the light

streams from right to left. Not even

the white frame is missing, or the silence

that consolidates this random pattern.

The sun just risen above the horizon lights up

a squadron of clouds that the wind is pushing

from the northwest across a swollen sky.

We've seen this spectacle a hundred times, on mornings

in childhood, seeing everything for the first time,

then later in photographs that stood for the world;

none of that stems our astonishment at such majesty

passing above a city distinguished solely by its

extreme banality. But we're not really seeing

that divine explosion of a world's beginning

(Earth, Earth, oh burning bush); we're watching ourselves

watching it, preparing to remember having seen it.

A revolving light flashes amongst traffic signals

in the street spangled with windows,

at the hour when offices are emptying;

it's some small drama, a fender crunched, not worth

so much as a line in tomorrow morning's paper.

The closed sky presses the night down

over this scene having all the appearances of the fake,

and which it is, irredeemably. What are you doing

here, walled in by so much shoddy stuff?

Darkness streams down across the windshield, swept

at intervals by reflections from the street lights, while

you drive down the disorderly street that is your life.

A wine-red sun smears the sky's canvas;

what a perpetually repainted ceiling it is,

this vulgar decor above the ashen streets!

We run up against intangible barriers,

we tramp through snow mixed with mud,

in the winter's chill, in the winter's drabness.

The soul does not aspire to eternal life;

it condenses into a breath or faint mist,

into a haze that thickens the light.

A crow splashes space with his inky shape

and, amidst the rumble of buses, performs

the solo part in a dissonant concert.

The sun's low circuit

daubs the housefronts with light that's pink,

white, then yellow, depending on the hour.

The trees no longer block its passage,

except with branches, boughs and twigs

that scribble their shadows on the sidewalks

in the thick or thin strokes of a writing

which no one will figure out.

By four o'clock the show is over;

the walls seem to lose all substance,

subsumed into the air as it melts into blackness.

In sum, another winter day is done.

A wall of night presses against the window;

we see nothing there but a surface painted

in the densest black, evenly, without a spot;

the pane becomes a mirror turned to the inside,

replicating the room while revealing nothing

that we did not see already, except that black.

It reveals no other space, only a fabric woven

by the absence of all light. It's refreshing,

this bath of blackness, as we imagine it,

not giving it form, the slick nothingness,

the truly limitless ocean where, for the moment,

one has no other face than this reflection.

A lilac strip, interrupted by the line of houses,

themselves enclosed by winter branches,

stands in for twilight in the windowpanes.

The daylight diffracting through the air's prism

has turned blue-black; as always it's

the same over-painting in the same pattern.

It's slathered with black, ever more

saturated, and keeps on thickening, blacker even

than anything Frans Hals ever brushed on;

it's clumping, covering everything,

patiently, not leaving the slightest chink

which might let us see we know not what.

The variations of the light raise up

a different city every day.

Fog, rain, snow and wind reweave

the weathered web of streets. Since this

is the north, the sun's a rare event.

At dusk, it's windows that checker

the broken horizon with symmetrical stars.

Then all collapses. The formless murk

heaps up its immaterial substance,

until a different space is shaped,

blind, cut through with close partitions

that fall away when one gropes ahead.

The expanse unfurled by springtime

spreads through the park and through memory,

under our feet and inside our heads—green.

We walk in the street, which the sun is

re-peopling with strollers, and in the idea

we create for ourselves of a street in April.

Moment by moment we move from the room

we fashion from memories, true or false,

to the heaping up of those tiny realities

that every instant's made of: the to and fro

of the traffic, the wind, the flight of birds

carrying augury only to those who desire it.

An endless crowd hustles through these streets

where even the cars, bumper to bumper,

seem to have come in search of gridlock.

Night's neons stripe colours over the jostling throng

and pour puddles of trumpery light on the sidewalks,

advertising the pleasures to be found within.

Perfumes mingled with sweat float on the air

between bodies touching as they pass. Little cries

are heard, and laughter and bits of sentences.