For As Far as the Eye Can See (6 page)

The October light is splintering

through the prism of the first frosts;

since it's freezing now at night,

the vegetation has taken on colours

that seem almost lacquered or varnished,

diffracting the sunlight in the streets.

Suddenly we realize that we're living

inside the universal clock, of which we

are only a tiny cogwheel. Red is mixed

with everything, the wind dumps it in the streets;

we catch ourselves dragging our feet through it

like a schoolboy whose homework isn't done.

A manuscript with crossings out, some books,

a few of them open, others in stacks,

a glass of pens, a paper cutter, scissors,

a ruler, a notebook, several pencils,

a pad of squared-off paper, a laptop computer,

an ashtray, a lighter, a packet of cigarettes;

all this would make up a still life,

unless you added—but he's here already—

a man, dreaming amongst these things and

facing an autumn landscape that fills the window,

which would result in another recognized genre:

the portrait of the artist in his studio.

Patches of sunlight on the blind,

mingled with shadows more or less dense,

produce an effect, as in the cave,

or on a movie screen, of a shadow of

something that may be only a shadow

or, as Plotinus thought, a chain

of increasingly tattered shadows.

The wind has cleared the sky of

the veil of haze that was clouding it.

We've raised the blind, opened the curtains

and gaze into an illusion of blue infinity

that stretches out and away, away, away.

Here on this side are the call letters PA

for Latin, and over there the letters PQ

for Romance literature, which is to say

for paradise: so much prose and poetry

that a blissful eternity would not suffice

for us to read it all, from Lucretius and Horace

to Saint-Denys Garneau, Borges and Montale,

from Aulus Gellius to Joubert, to Cioran, to Léautaud.

One could just as well say Seneca, and Ponge, and Leopardi,

Petrarch, Pessoa, Montaigne … one recites these names

and those of Sbarbaro, Erasmus, or Marteau, giddy

at having inhaled the inexhaustible catalogue.

The garden's chirping since a flock of starlings

swooped down on the trees around it.

There must be hundreds of them out there to form

such a resounding orchestra, endlessly

repetitive and full-throated, with amplitude

variations that are hollowing out space.

More reminiscent of Philip Glass than of Messiaen,

it's like a symphony with neither start

nor finish, made up of a single chord

sustained, layered, unfurled, as if flinging

an immense hurrah into the whirling

of the leaves in the autumn sunlight.

The wind scatters leaves into the light

while a flock of black birds passes over

in apparent disorder, but that's an illusion,

since all is structure without your knowing it.

You see the rain mixing a vortex of glimmers

into the torrent of sunlight, and you realize

that it's all music, moving and alive;

that this isn't a picture for you to gaze at,

languidly, at your leisure, but a great river

sweeping you away, and that it's this morning

in October, the first and last in all the world.

Your existence is not really important.

Pensively, a cat pads off down the laneway

between board fences enclosing small gardens,

crumbs or metaphors for that absolute garden, the earth.

Along cracks in the asphalt run threads of grass

whose pattern may spell out the inconceivable

name of God, or the shape of the world.

Busy with matters known only to him, the cat

sidesteps old papers, shattered glass, tin cans,

nameless objects highlighted by the sun.

We can't approach him; as soon as we step forward,

he walks calmly away, sure as he is of escaping

in a single bound should we try to catch him.

The fog pressing on the windows

adds to the silence in the house.

No car has gone by yet.

The city seems to be sleeping the sleep

of thousands of sleepers, each in his dream,

in his own chaotic, private world.

The newspaper hasn't been delivered yet,

the kitchen's raw light picks out each object,

even if night still lingers in the corners.

On the table, the basket of fruit is

trying hard, without success, to look

like the one that Caravaggio painted.

Let's lift our faces to this October sunlight,

and close our eyes; at once we'll share

the entirely philosophical well-being of the cat

who's stretched out in the grass,

unmoved that the wind around him is stirring up

a shifting edifice of perfumes.

Its brightness sifts down through the maple which,

in another day or two, will have few leaves left,

so that we'll see the bare bones of its branches

beneath the blue enhanced by clouds,

like a temple built of columns only, through which

a god might pass, what god we do not know.

The city's never so lovely as in the afternoon,

between three and four, with the day lowering,

in November. The light spreads, an ever finer

dusting of weightlessness over the stones,

with dim figures walking the dreaming streets

as they sink deeper amongst tall buildings.

Everywhere windows are lighting up. They cast

glimmering nets that may catch a face,

momentarily, then another, not as ghosts,

but seizing each in his singular eternity,

while the doorways of stores are lighting up

under shreds of sky whence falls the night.

All of autumn, finally, is only a sepia snapshot

with crackled edges, in which we see

some elms thrusting their branches' inky

strokes up against a troubled sky.

All of autumn, finally, is only a pack

of commonplaces, regrets for that which was

and was not, a wasteland swept by the wind

until, one morning, crossing the park, we feel

the grass crunch underfoot; it froze overnight,

and in the life-giving cold, in the air

that we breathe in with delight, suddenly

we know that winter's light is on its way.

Three men are tarring a roof.

Through the icy air we see steam

condensing round their backlit silhouettes.

It lends their movements that solemnity

produced in the movies by slow motion.

The winter sun climbs so imperceptibly

that time seems to have stopped.

We hear their voices when their work

is more difficult, but mostly they're silent

and we hear only hammer blows

ringing the sky's colossal bell

where the white light spreads and grows.

All is given at every instant in the space that

unfolds for the glance forever unwearied

of seeing what there is to see. One can begin

anywhere and follow the tremors of the light

beneath the sky's ever-present vault

where a cloud of birds is wheeling.

The wind shakes the shadows on the walls

still holding day's glow. Time does not pass.

It has never passed, since Achilles never does

catch up with the tortoise, since we never see but

that which is painted before our eyes: this street,

this rustle of sunlight blending into the air.

Through the rain, the leafless rowan tree

seems as if painted in stipples

that hint at its brownish-black lines.

The old masters knew how

to apply such touches, by means of which

reality might be recognized.

To left and right and out in front,

we see street lights and their reflections,

a sequence of patches the eye follows

in their random distribution through a space

furnished with masses that are sometimes

objects, and sometimes shadows.

The bread bag lies on the kitchen counter,

with the bread beside it, under the white light

that casts a round gleam on the tomatoes.

To the right, they're flanked by green patches of basil,

to the left, we see an onion, the salt shaker,

the pepper mill, and a bottle of oil.

This is almost a recipe, with the knife

beside the cutting board. On the table,

the basket of apples and plums makes up

a more usual design in yellow, red and blue,

although we are no less beguiled

by the same virtues of the frugal and the familiar.

A banner of clouds, the rising sun,

the point of view from which we look (a height

that lays the city out in panorama)

conspire to cloak the horizon in a canvas

painted with mountains we never knew were there,

like an Andean cordillera or the Himalayas,

of no substance other than the air, the damp,

the dawn brushing the rooftops. In the distance,

their lack of reality is not obvious to the eye

and we're inspired with a longing to deny

that these roofs and streets are realer, made of

harder brick and concrete than that veil of vapour.

All seems at a standstill in this quiet neighbourhood.

It could be Thursday morning, or the afternoon

of any other day. One checks one's watch. Outside

the grocery, an old woman sets down a bag of provisions

and looks at the snow that's blurring the light, a

prismatic dust falling from a sky where hangs

a sun that we can stare straight into.

Could we gaze at death like that, unblinking? Maybe,

if it was just as veiled and if it opened out

like this snow-softened day, like this space

where chimney smoke lifts and thins, like this street.

The woman collects her bag and crosses with slow steps.

Night has settled its simplest scene at the window;

red beacons from the radio tower flash the message

that the dark stretching out through the upper air

is an area of space that features solid objects,

into which one may crash, should one be a plane,

a bird, or an angel, and stray into this space.

Lower down, brick walls lit up by street lights

present a curtain cut through by angles and pierced

with windows in asymmetrical distribution.

Sometimes lamps are lit there and if, as here,

the curtains are not drawn, they offer the view

of a monad, enclosed between walls and a ceiling.

Northern birds are almost always in

the colours of wood, their feathers resembling

nothing so much as shades of bark.

The cardinal's an exception, so dazzling

you'd think him dreamt up by a hobbyist god

or drawn by a child who's just been given

coloured crayons and sheets of plain white