For As Far as the Eye Can See Read Free

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