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

of a baroque church, but one would
    search in vain through this real, this empty sky,
    for a saint’s apotheosis, accompanied by the
    swish of wings from a troupe of cherubim.
    A truck rolls across the intersection
    trailing behind it a bluish plume
    through the nine o’clock light.
    Wandering in the cool and limpid air
    we see movements bereft of meaning;
    they might be splinters of space,
    or shards of light tumbling from the roofs,
    as if traced by a cubist painter
    between those houses, had he painted
    this street, at this time of day,
    in the newness of a world restored
    to the paradise of its first names.
    Between the trees, over by the cinema, we catch
    sight of the sun setting a slow fire whose gleam,
    beyond the park, tinges the facing houses.
    After having gazed at its metallic splendour
    through the gap the expressway opens to the river
    (stream of mercury, haze of copper, fume of bronze),
    we’ll find its embers once again on a cornice
    in a street the daylight won’t have reached and
    where it shows itself, furtively, only at noon.
    For the moment we’re strolling an avenue of maples,
    like the country setting for some hermitage,
    all golden, and scuffing our feet in the leaves.
    A whorl in the third windowpane is
    bending the landscape. Move your head and
    at once the roof’s edge pinches and folds,
    at once the brick wall takes on
    the pliancy of cloth, wrinkling and stretching.
    And where does this game lead?
    A simple bubble in a sheet of glass and
    all you thought so solid is making a face.
    To what serves mortal beauty? Hopkins asked,
    and answered, too quickly, that it kindles
    in man’s mind the desire for what exists.
    But look: it’s nothing but a fold, or a knot.
    A straight line between two fields of blue
    is enough to make a seascape, minimalist,
    but a seascape nonetheless if the observer,
    whom one sees from behind as in Friedrich, adds
    a little good will. Missing was the movement
    of waves at the bottom, always the bottom, fringed
    with the foam we’ve just added. With that come the growl
    of the undertow, the cold air, salty, seaweed-scented,
    the wind blowing from offshore, the scumbling
    of the light in the heaving prism of the swells,
    and this pallor in the sky, not so blue after all
    when filtered through the spray of spindrift in the air.
    The sun’s taking pictures of the trees,
    in black and white, on the sidewalk.
    Projected on the ground and the walls
    are copies of it all, swayed by the wind
    and extinguished by the slightest cloud.
    Thus there’s a double lying beside you
    whom you never glance at unless it’s his snaking
    shadow while you climb a few steps,
    or else when a melancholy mood
    reminds you that soon you’ll be laid out
    between his insubstantial arms
    in an unending clasp.
    â€œThe bronze rain …” “No, it’s a haze.”
    â€œThe sun’s bronze haze is announcing
    that soon we’ll be plunged into cold darkness.”
    â€œNot so fast—there’s a choir of starlings
    chirping in polyphony.” “How can there be so many
    of them (supposing there are) without our seeing them?”
    â€œNever mind, we do hear them, and sometimes
    too we hear the squeaking pully of a solo blue jay.”
    Close to the sun-warmed brick of the wall,
    one feels a philosophical well-being, not
    really inexpressible but certainly very sweet.
    â€œIt’s not going to last, this artificial eternity.”
    In spite of the cars, the rain can be heard
    pattering on the leaves and the roadway
    in this mere murmur, devoid of melody,
    or rather as a silence made audible.
    The rain has no beginning. It seems
    all at once to have been there forever
    in a hidden fold of time. The passer-by
    who’s taken refuge in the doorway of a store,
    looks out and around into blurred space,
    slowly, as if seeking a glimpse of himself,
    shadow of a shadow, shadow amongst shadows,
    in some existence other than this