leaving only small change, which he jingles.
The light can be seen suspending
a hazy prismatic fog above
a long vista of gardens and
through a tracery of branches
that a late spring has held for
a month too long in winter nudity.
Its stippled shimmering lends truth
to the painting of Seurat; in a rosy,
bluish, violet dust, the luminance
clothes all these things with a
double that reveals, in philosophical
heaven, their shapes.
A fat cumulus cloud floats on a sea of blue;
it might be a sky by Poussin. It’s much like this
that we imagine paradise—as an eiderdown
for us to roll ourselves up in while watching
all the earth go by below: rivers, valleys,
mountains and cities, and the oceans
with their toy boats, the forests, the animals
on the savanna or the tundra, better
than on television or at the movies, with
all the labours, the games, puerile and secretive,
of irreplaceable little men, each pursuing
affairs known only to himself.
We walk through streets we know
or used to know … the eye
collides with walls that were not here
when first we ventured out,
unwittingly, into this labyrinth;
a vacant lot which now we see only
in recollection, was over there,
where a tower of blue glass rises, a cube
of hardened sky. But a parking lot
offers an opening that lets us see,
at afternoon’s end, the orb of a sun
which we are pleased to recognize.
In eight or nine hundred paces, we’ve passed
a dozen beggars, whom we have pretended
not to see. Farther along, a pierrot is sitting
on a folding chair in the middle of the sidewalk,
preparing his show—there’s no way past him.
In his left hand he’s holding a pocket mirror
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
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
&nb
sp; 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,
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 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,