For As Far as the Eye Can See (3 page)

and applying an ointment to his face, scooping

it with three fingers from a jar clenched

between his knees. Absorbed in his business,

he's indifferent to passers-by stepping round him,

amongst whom he'll soon find a willing audience.

Some of them, off to the side, are waiting already.

The light wavers through the window,

tremulous with rainwash. The whole landscape

blurs when one squints one's eyes, smoothing

the ripples of the water, unfolding the fluid canvas

woven on the pane by wind and rain:

a few trees, some grass, the tombstones,

the road over there, beyond the cemetery

and, farther off, tight ranks of houses

at the foot of the hill that blocks the horizon.

Then the light reaches the vanishing point,

towards that trembling in the west, that opening

into which the eye plunges and is engulfed.

By such a subtle variation in the rhythm

from the very first notes, which a movement

at once firm and singing launches

and withholds in the building up of an edifice

both unforeseeable and necessary, does one

recognize, in the sonatas of Haydn,

a world constructed of nothing but time,

from the progress in itself of a form that

seems the only possible homeland, and

which stands for everything: refrain and

variation, thrust and abatement in a slow,

measured impatience, at the centre of continuance.

We hear the wind gusting over the roofs

as if through a tunnel and, looking up,

are astonished to see so much blue, seeking

we know not what vault, what ceiling.

The earth beneath the changing sky

is an imaginary space. A dry leaf

that has clung all winter, falls. Tiny forked

flames, of a green shot through with yellow,

form on the lilacs, at the end of each branch.

In a maple, red and yellow tufts

are sprouting; thus the earliest spring

looks onwards to autumn. Time turns.

Space is enlivened at last with leaves

running along the branches' framework.

For too long this year the cold

has kept the trees in a dormant state.

This is truly the North; it's raining.

The low sky makes of the world one room

under a ceiling of vapours painted with

scrollings of chalky brightness.

Warblers, of the black-and-white sort,

fly down, perch, fly off and are gone.

The horizon lightens with a long pale scarf which

would have pleased the austere Glenn Gould.

A dancer carries the weight of the night

she's spent under the eyes of voyeurs;

a prostitute waits for her customer to leave

so she can grab a syringe; a drunk is using

a trash can for a pillow, snoring in the refuse;

under an overpass, dim shapes shift and turn;

a vagrant walks away, pushing a baby carriage

that he's heaped with his jumble of treasures; the

pink and green wave rolling and spreading

above the streets clothes them all in sanctity,

while those who despise them go on

sleeping behind their closed curtains.

Up there on a cordillera of clouds

the sun has set a glacier too white

for it not to be a fake.

Soon this sky will be leaden; there'll

be nothing moving unless the icy wind

(for this is the north, the North

of grey springtimes and the recordings

of Glenn Gould) starts a quivering in the leaves,

barely formed as yet, of trees stiffer

than fence posts. Outlined on the coppery

evening, the maple blossoms look as if

turned on a lathe, cut out with a blowtorch.

Soundlessly the evening burns, yellow-white

at the end of this unswerving street

bordered with a double row of trees,

and climbing the slope towards the west

between houses as rigorously aligned

as on a town planner's blueprint.

The shadows blur them all together until

suddenly this commonplace street resembles

a setting from Italian theatre, like

an infinite perspective in front of which

might be played out, in the failing light,

some tragedy in alexandrines.

The day has deepened into chambers,

corridors, porticoes and passages,

ever since summer has thrust up

partitions of foliage, raised up

hedges and woven the dome of boughs,

a palace with fluid doorways enclosed

in walls of light. In countless columns,

bearing their capitals of real leaves,

the trees support a blue vault

painted with real clouds, that move,

adorned with real birds, that fly,

and scattered at night with real stars.

The progress of sunlight along the wall

may be read as a sign the wind is rising;

it might be the glow of a burning house.

In the depths of philosophy's cave,

the shades whom Plato locked in must have seen

movements like these, so lovely.

The frenzied ballet of the birds suggests

they're announcing a storm, the first squall

of this summer so little like summer.

Heavy clouds jostle and bump along

a horizon suddenly solid as concrete,

then space fills up with a thick rain.

It all has to fit into twelve lines—a lesser sonnet—

all that's depicted at every instant inside the cave

dug out by Plato for the chaining up of those

whom he deemed to be dupes of illusion. But in his

system's sphere, the soul struggling to be free

had to swap for a stale whiteness, all pleasing things:

these wind-harrowed trees, the play of sun and shadow,

that pink-and-brown bird alighting on a wire.

So I shall settle for the paradise of what I see:

I trace this rectangle of twelve lines and

make of it a window through which to observe

all that appears, and that happens once only.

The sky behind's a canvas loomed from mist

and storm. The nearer view, of housefronts

in brick and stone, offers plain flat tints of

red, brown and grey, as in Breughel.

Beyond the rooftops we look down over, a slender

pointed steeple stands out against the light,

all depth lost. A fine rain, hardly more than

a dust of droplets, quivers in the air, while

colours, saturated, exude subtle seepages.

A man in a khaki raincoat, looking tiny

when seen from the sixth floor, walks

along a hoarding plastered with posters.

File folders, open books, a notebook,

some pencils, a floppy disk, an eraser,

a notepad, an ashtray, a pencil sharpener,

a paper knife, a computer, a ballpoint pen,

a packet of cigarettes, a ruler, a cup;

the sun splashes this jumbled arrangement

with patches of light, and its movement from right

to left marks the passage of happy hours.

Any table covered with objects randomly assembled

is a still life that could be painted or described.

Towards ten o'clock, a line of shadow will pass

across the dictionary, which contains all poems.

All that is offered at every instant: splinters

of sunlight, the sound of the wind, yellow,

rust-coloured, wine-red leaves, whirling …

on another day, under a hardened sky, there'll

be the geometric houses, etched with a chisel

into the eternity of an afternoon's end.

And reader, on the page, you will read what I

have before my eyes, what I set down in these words

and what I conceal in them, since they convey

only what you find here, what you put in;

if you consent, I shall not have counted their

syllables or pondered their meanings in vain.

A pair of sparrows hops across the flagstones,

showing off, parading their pale bellies,

their grey-capped heads and striped wings.

In syncopated skips, one after the other, they pass

from shadow into sunlight, that paints their feathers

with lovely brown and black splashes.

Their little round eyes miss nothing, ever vigilant

for possible danger, always close at hand: there,

in that bush, here, under this bench, everywhere.

Something has flickered, either a patch of sun

or nothing, conjured up by their endless anxiety

and, in a whirring of air, they've vanished.

At night, in the business district where,

a few hours later, a crowd will be thronging,

we can wander voluptuously alone

through a setting that seems nothing more

than simply false, as we follow streets filled,

at other times, with cars and trucks.

We can plunge into solitude and darkness

when nothing is left but the city's shape,

like a deserted stage.

All useless now—the names of the streets,

the billboards, the traffic lights—and the silence

of these new ruins lets footsteps ring.

We see the rain in the sphere of brightness

cast by a street light near a rowan tree.

We hear its ongoing whisper as water

patters over the leaves and splashes

on the roadway; we listen with pleasure to

its periodic murmur, infinitely reassuring;

we watch the endless weaving of the raindrops

through the air, over the roofs, the trees, the street.

The whole night is filled with its susurrus

which dwindles, then swells again, returning

like some inexorable trampling, soft-footed

and coming from all sides at the same time.

Places like this seem vaster, always,

at night. There's a sound of fountains

playing, spewing up streams of light.

The wind surges between office towers, then

wanders in the open, ruffling the ornamental

trees some landscaper has set out in an

even row to replicate the bank's colonnade.

Cars pull up at red lights, then start off

again with a noise of gears meshing.

At once it all seems theatrically

deserted, this setting of stone and glass

overhung by a cardboard cut-out moon.

Downhill, the city fades from view

under a watercolour sky, everything melting

into it where the horizon line should run.

Between the treetops in the nearer view,

through an opening found by stepping to the right,

is a dome floating high above the roofs,

which we see with matchless clarity through

the prism of a rain so fine that we divine it

without quite seeing it: almost an oscillation

of the light, an imponderable architecture

of reflections, with the fleeting beauty of that

which one will think one has not seen.

The narrow street climbs and turns under a thread

of sky edging in and out amongst buildings, hardly

visible enough to see what the weather's like,