For As Far as the Eye Can See (5 page)

Eyes meet and shift, look again, seeking.

Some walk quickly on while others, furtive,

push in through doors that let out stale music.

Three geezers are lined up on the old folks' balcony—

or the balcony, rather, of the “seniors' residence,”

as the language of the century would have it,

to cover up what's really only a place to die,

where they shut away those whom we'll never see

grinning from the magazines' coloured ads.

Sitting in white plastic armchairs, as far

from each other as possible, without moving, and

rigid as tomb effigies, they may be dead already.

They're staring into the street's stark sunlight.

When we cross in front of them, only their eyes

move in their masks, and follow as we pass.

We hear, for the first time this year,

the long cry of the nighthawk diving into

the clouds of bugs that swarm round the street lights.

The room expands beyond measure with the

flood of murmurs pouring from the open window.

A car goes by trailing a rumbling backwash

that fades off forever into the darkness.

In this ocean of heat and humidity,

we shall not sleep without dreaming,

just as during the day we dream

that other dream, no less chaotic,

that's unthinkingly called the world.

The sun outlines the elms, the maples and

other trees out there, blurred against the light;

voices can be heard, engines, birds,

and the wind stirring in the leaves.

All this is part of evening's approach.

Clouds stretch a tarpaulin across the sky

washed by the storm at afternoon's end;

soon it will be paling, imperceptibly,

until broader and broader patches of shadow

are brushed across the walls, growing heavier

and heavier, till we see them painted over, until

black, unrelieved, will have snatched it all away.

This we read in a newspaper which smudges our fingers:

cosmologists have discovered that the world

is in accelerated expansion, or so they say,

into infinity. Lucretius knew as much as that,

and as little; from the fall of everything

in every way, all is done and all undone.

The sun in the wet grass lights up

as many stars as the eye can see;

a flock of starlings wheels, opens out,

gathers again and plunges into an elm which

instantly fills with chirping. The scent of newsprint

mingles with the odour of damp earth.

The boulevard runs beneath a sky painted

in fresco with a baroque landslide of clouds.

The alignment of the trees outlines a ship

surmounted by a perfect arch, rounded

above a colonnade whose capitals

of leaves and birds are stirring in the wind.

At the horizon, the slow rose-window

of a pink and green dawn glorifies

the rising of a sun so white it seems

the spectrum must have liquified within it.

Then all of space is washed with blue,

cars go by, and the day has dawned.

Try to recite the terrible names of God.

He's yesterday's paper scattering in the windy street,

and this faceless wind that creeps in everywhere;

He's a patch of sunlight on the grass in the park,

and that grass ruffled by the wind; He's a perfume,

the floating dust, that footstep walking away;

He's the cement of the sidewalk and the pigeon's

parabola between the trees and the roofs,

arcing unseen through the blue of the light;

He's the diesel smell behind a bus, those

absent looks you meet and pass, the prismatic air.

He's a word not spoken, which you shall never speak.

The man who walks at night, under an umbrella,

lends form to the world as he spins out the thread

of his promenade. To either side the street

is lustrous with the colours brought out

by the damp while, with each foot set down,

he pronounces a silent, ongoing
fiat lux
.

Each house, each tree, each passer-by,

the traffic and the spheres of brightness

that tremble round the street lights, are

at once erased as his steps transport him

onwards, into the cave encompassed by

the darkness, the shower and his meditation.

The sedum droops beneath its umbels which

the October sunlight tinges with pink and grey.

The sky, suffused with blue, is rounded

into a dome, its base festooned with cornices.

Crows—five? eight?—fly philosophically

up the street, all leisurely wisdom.

Suddenly, from an unknown source, and

irrepressible as the shower of notes in

a Scarlatti sonata, there wells up all the joy

that it is possible to know. Asters

splash the torrent of white light as it

shifts the shadow: the world's clock turns.

From the right, the sun outlines the edges

of this chair, tracing its anamorphosis

on the wall. Your shadow sits there, also

in anamorphosis. Your gestures, in that flat

grey and white world, are translated to the slant,

unless you yourself are the projection,

gifted with volume and solidity, of that web

of patches and lines moving on the wall's screen.

Unless that wall, those shadows, that sun, this chair

and you—this surface and its projection into space—

should open out, superfluous petals of no bouquet,

in a point purely ideal, at the centre of nothing.

Suppose that a gust of wind blows over the rooftops,

a single wave in the ocean of air, in the immense

openness of space, with no point of reference. Suppose

that the air is folding and rolling and that it's only

a noise, a rustling of the ether, the sudden unwinding

of a cable running out. There'll be evening also,

laid out in the ordinary street, between the houses

made of nothing, seemingly, but a slightly denser night.

There'll be darkness heaped at the feet of those houses,

and the channel of this street sunk deeper still,

where we shall pursue our course, step by step,

in the tides of the air and the eddies of the wind.

In this out-of-the-way neighbourhood, near noon,

there's nothing but autumn under a wide-open sky.

Patches of sunlight are redistributing

masses in the hollow channel of the street

under the tattered arch of a double row of trees.

The houses, slashed with zones of shadow,

create colliding angles. A crow, with

loud caws, takes possession of the world

from the top of a totemic maple, streaked

with straw-coloured and wine-red patches.

The scene is set for whatever event might

happen here, although the decor suffices.

Each house sends up a plume of smoke which

the wind beats back down on the roofs. In the

distant sky, shadow heaps upon shadow.

This is the year's lowest point, when nothing

seems likely to begin again, nor the cold cease

to weigh on the mind numbed by this allegory

that pictures its passing. But can the word

‘cold' cause a shiver in he who utters it?

And can this city of concrete, metal and brick

be translated to metaphor? What is there

to decipher in these streets which the snow is

blending into space paved with greyish light?

The window squares off our view

of this landscape made of one angled street

and the contrasting levels of several walls

edged with trees plunked down, it seems,

in the most complete disorder. It should

be possible to render this in every detail,

on a sheet ruled off in lines, in keeping

with the example of the designer

of a plate which Dürer used to illustrate

his treatise on perspective. But it's all

laid out flat, with no vanishing point, on

windowpanes that also reflect the room.

A comic-strip sky, for some sunset ending,

unfurls violet banners above the street,

their contours sharp, on a ground as grey-blue

as if poured from an inkwell. The street,

almost empty at this hour, in this district,

leads straight to the narrow horizon framed

by two rows of housefronts. Two even lines

of trees trimmed back with architectural rigour

vanish in parallel. We walk through ideal urban

planning purged of nature and every irregularity,

towards we know not what, blissfully ignorant

but borne up by this perfectly oriented space.

A contralto voice responds to a clarinet

and we might wish the duet to last forever,

but as soon as the record stops, we hear

the myriad voices of the crickets through

the mid-September night, rediscovering time

and this rainy summer that never seems to end.

Of these songs one listens to with all one's soul

drunk with memory, dazed by what exists, and

lost between near and far, so that death,

we hope, may seize it in all ravishment,

which is the more beautiful? We cannot say,

in this dreaming dusk that is all of life.

You gaze at the window coated with black,

and striving to describe the city's expanse

through such a mild early autumn night,

you search for words that might raise up,

from a perfectly level horizon, the lemon

disk of a moon never seen except in painting.

For then volumes of shadow could be created,

with infinite space opening out between them.

But there's only this black, inked evenly in

and lacking all depth, but with, here and there,

patches of lighted windows, and the speckles

of street lights … which everyone has already seen.

A driver stopped at a red light

sees the ages of life pass in front of him:

slender, supple schoolgirls, in uniform,

and old women alone, carrying bags,

as well as old men, just as alone, crossing

with slow steps. The street becomes an allegory.

Working people pass by, a couple,

a man walking a dog. All that's missing,

under a tree or in some recessed spot,

is a grizzled reaper with a scythe, maybe brandishing

an hourglass as well. The driver listens,

distractedly, to the five o'clock news.

A rowan branch looms up out of the fog

in which all else is progressively dissolved

like the background of a photograph when

the zoom, focused on the central figure,

drowns and dilutes the rest in light.

The rowan's vermillion clusters stand out,

lacquered with moisture, as incredibly clear

as if painted by Georgia O'Keeffe, although

she would have cut even that surrounding space,

grey on grey, where the light turns to haze,

and the knot of branches, a copper-green mass,

which is the single scrap of reality to be seen.