For As Far as the Eye Can See (7 page)

paper; he puts in a red patch, adds

a squiggle for the ruff, another for the rather

jaunty tail, and the buttery point of the beak

planted in the black mask. Then he crumples

the scrawl as fast as the bird blurs into the air.

The trees lift up the lightweight net

of their leafless crowns to the cloudy sky

that encompasses all beneath its arch.

There streams from it an even light, giving

all things their true colours; lacking the shadow

of darker tones to enhance the contrast

of their faces turned to the brightness,

this day swims all in the same waters, rising

and falling all together, all at the same time.

And what at first one takes for silence

is revealed as music, in such perfect measure

that we breathe to its rhythm, attuned to the whole.

Seize this winter day, under its demure and

fading sky, and this balmy-seeming air,

so warm is the sun on the grass in the park.

It should be covered by now. Only the snow

should smooth the sweep, which would

then be just as you picture nothingness:

devoid of qualities, and tainting even

the possibility that there may exist

the irreplaceable paradise of a single thing,

and one thing only. Do not indulge in imagining

a whiteness such as might bestow a face

on disappearance. That would be wrong.

The poet stepped up to the microphone

in front of the few people making up

the small audience that had come to hear him read.

In the bookstore window, before going in,

he'd seen his little book beneath a notice

which said “Sunday Poetry Readings.”

He took a swallow of water, smiled quickly,

leafed through his book and hesitated to read the poem

that he'd nonetheless chosen when preparing.

He blurted out some words of explanation,

put his hand in his pocket, and then a different voice

was heard, which was and was not his own.

So much softness is a presage of snow;

the day has closed in, the air taken on

a scent of wood and of damp stone.

All seems to be waiting, motionless—

the houses, people in the street, traffic—

all displays itself, even the shadows.

We hear the cawing of a crow

and search for him in vain through

the fine network of small branches.

Then the clouds release, from zenith

to horizon, a downy light which

resolves itself, slowly, into flakes.

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