For As Far as the Eye Can See Read Free Page 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,
    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