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.
“The bronze rain …” “No, it’s a haze.”
“The sun’s bronze haze is announcing
that soon we’ll be plunged into cold darkness.”
“Not 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?”
“Never 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.
“It’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 dream.
Eighteen tomatoes have been set out to ripen
on the window ledge; the result is a
still life that could be painted.
The sunlight adds a rounded white
highlight to each of them, which is
balanced by a little pedestal of shadow.
Beyond the pane, a hedge plaits
a green tracery that provides a backdrop
blurred with reflections, over which the light
streams from right to left. Not even
the white frame is missing, or the silence
that consolidates this random pattern.
The sun just risen above the horizon lights up
a squadron of clouds that the wind is pushing
from the northwest across a swollen sky.
We’ve seen this spectacle a hundred times, on mornings
in childhood, seeing everything for the first time,
then later in photographs that stood for the world;
none of that stems our astonishment at such majesty
passing above a city distinguished solely by its
extreme banality. But we’re not really seeing
that divine explosion of a world’s beginning
(Earth, Earth, oh burning bush); we’re watching ourselves
watching it, preparing to remember having seen it.
A revolving light flashes amongst traffic signals
in the street spangled with windows,
at the hour when offices are emptying;
it’s some small drama, a fender crunched, not worth
so much as a line in tomorrow morning’s paper.
The closed sky presses the night down
over this scene having all the appearances of the fake,
and which it is, irredeemably. What are you doing
here, walled in by so much shoddy stuff?
Darkness streams down across the windshield, swept
at intervals by reflections from the street lights, while
you drive down the disorderly street that is your life.
A wine-red sun smears the sky’s canvas;
what a perpetually repainted ceiling it is,
this vulgar decor above the ashen streets!
We run up against intangible barriers,
we tramp through snow mixed with mud,
in the winter’s chill, in the winter’s drabness.
The soul does not aspire to eternal life;
it condenses into a breath or faint mist,
into a haze that thickens the light.
A crow splashes space with his inky shape
and, amidst the rumble of buses, performs
the solo part in a dissonant concert.
The sun’s low circuit
daubs the housefronts with light that’s pink,
white, then yellow, depending on the hour.
The trees no longer block its passage,
except with branches, boughs and twigs
that scribble their shadows on the sidewalks
in the thick or thin strokes of a writing
which no one will figure out.
By four o’clock the show is over;
the walls seem to lose all substance,
subsumed into the air as it melts into blackness.
In sum, another winter day is done.
A wall of night presses against the window;
we see nothing there but a surface painted
in the densest black, evenly, without a spot;
the pane becomes a mirror turned to the inside,
replicating the room while revealing nothing
that we did not see already, except that black.
It reveals no other space, only a fabric woven
by the absence of all light. It’s refreshing,
this bath of blackness, as we imagine it,
not giving it form, the slick nothingness,
the truly limitless ocean where, for the moment,
one has no other face than this reflection.
A lilac strip, interrupted by the line of houses,
themselves enclosed by winter branches,
stands in for twilight in the windowpanes.
The daylight diffracting through the air’s prism
has turned blue-black; as always it’s
the same over-painting in the same pattern.
It’s slathered with black, ever more
saturated, and keeps on thickening, blacker even
than anything Frans Hals ever brushed on;
it’s clumping, covering everything,
patiently, not leaving the slightest chink
which might let us see we know not what.
The variations of the light raise up
a different city every day.
Fog, rain, snow and wind reweave
the weathered web of streets. Since this
is the north, the sun’s a rare event.
At dusk, it’s windows that checker
the broken horizon with symmetrical stars.
Then all collapses. The formless murk
heaps up its immaterial substance,
until a different space is shaped,
blind, cut through with close partitions
that fall away when one gropes ahead.
The expanse unfurled by springtime
spreads through the park and through memory,
under our feet and inside our heads—green.
We walk in the street, which the sun is
re-peopling with strollers, and in the idea
we create for ourselves of a street in April.
Moment by moment we move from the room
we fashion from memories, true or false,
to the heaping up of those tiny r
ealities
that every instant’s made of: the to and fro
of the traffic, the wind, the flight of birds
carrying augury only to those who desire it.
An endless crowd hustles through these streets
where even the cars, bumper to bumper,
seem to have come in search of gridlock.
Night’s neons stripe colours over the jostling throng
and pour puddles of trumpery light on the sidewalks,
advertising the pleasures to be found within.
Perfumes mingled with sweat float on the air
between bodies touching as they pass. Little cries
are heard, and laughter and bits of sentences.
Eyes meet and shift, look again, seeking.
Some walk quickly on while others, furtive,
push in through doors that let out stale music.
Three geezers are lined up on the old folks’ balcony—
or the balcony, rather, of the “seniors’ residence,”
as the language of the century would have it,
to cover up what’s really only a place to die,
where they shut away those whom we’ll never see
grinning from the magazines’ coloured ads.
Sitting in white plastic armchairs, as far
from each other as possible, without moving, and
rigid as tomb effigies, they may be dead already.
They’re staring into the street’s stark sunlight.
When we cross in front of them, only their eyes
move in their masks, and follow as we pass.
We hear, for the first time this year,
the long cry of the nighthawk diving into
the clouds of bugs that swarm round the street lights.
The room expands beyond measure with the
flood of murmurs pouring from the open window.
A car goes by trailing a rumbling backwash
that fades off forever into the darkness.
In this ocean of heat and humidity,
we shall not sleep without dreaming,
just as during the day we dream
that other dream, no less chaotic,
that’s unthinkingly called the world.
The sun outlines the elms, the maples and
other trees out there, blurred against the light;
voices can be heard, engines, birds,
and the wind stirring in the leaves.
All this is part of evening’s approach.
Clouds stretch a tarpaulin across the sky
washed by the storm at afternoon’s end;
soon it will be paling, imperceptibly,
until broader and broader patches of shadow
are brushed across the walls, growing heavier
and heavier, till we see them painted over, until
black, unrelieved, will have snatched it all away.
This we read in a newspaper which smudges our fingers:
cosmologists have discovered that the world
is in accelerated expansion, or so they say,
into infinity. Lucretius knew as much as that,
and as little; from the fall of everything
in every way, all is done and all undone.
The sun in the wet grass lights up
as many stars as the eye can see;
a flock of starlings wheels, opens out,
gathers again and plunges into an elm which
instantly fills with chirping. The scent of newsprint
mingles with the odour of damp earth.
The boulevard runs beneath a sky painted
in fresco with a baroque landslide of clouds.
The alignment of the trees outlines a ship
surmounted by a perfect arch, rounded
above a colonnade whose capitals
of leaves and birds are stirring in the wind.
At the horizon, the slow rose-window
of a pink and green dawn glorifies
the rising of a sun so white it seems
the spectrum must have liquified within it.
Then all of space is washed with blue,
cars go by, and the day has dawned.
Try to recite the terrible names of God.
He’s yesterday’s paper scattering in the windy street,
and this faceless wind that creeps in everywhere;
He’s a patch of sunlight on the grass in the park,
and that grass ruffled by the wind; He’s a perfume,
the floating dust, that footstep walking away;
He’s the cement of the sidewalk and the pigeon’s
parabola between the trees and the roofs,
arcing unseen through the blue of the light;
He’s the diesel smell behind a bus, those
absent looks you meet and pass, the prismatic air.
He’s a word not spoken, which you shall never speak.
The man who walks at night, under an umbrella,
lends form to the world as he spins out the thread
of his promenade. To either side the street
is lustrous with the colours brought out
by the damp while, with each foot set down,
he pronounces a silent, ongoing fiat lux.
Each house, each tree, each passer-by,
the traffic and the spheres of brightness
that tremble round the street lights, are
at once erased as his steps transport him
onwards, into the cave encompassed by
the darkness, the shower and his meditation.
the October sunlight tinges with pink and grey.
The sky, suffused with blue, is rounded
into a dome, its base festooned with cornices.
Crows—five? eight?—fly philosophically
up the street, all leisurely wisdom.
Suddenly, from an unknown source, and
irrepressible as the shower of notes in
a Scarlatti sonata, there wells up all the joy
that it is possible to know. Asters
splash the torrent of white light as it
shifts the shadow: the world’s clock turns.
From the right, the sun outlines the edges
of this chair, tracing its anamorphosis
on the wall. Your shadow sits there, also
in anamorphosis. Your gestures, in that flat
grey and white world, are translated to the slant,
unless you yourself are the projection,
gifted with volume and solidity, of that web
of patches and lines moving on the wall’s screen.
Unless that wall, those shadows, that sun, this chair
and you—this surface and its projection into space—
should open out, superfluous petals of no bouquet,
in a point purely ideal, at the centre of nothing.
Suppose that a gust of wind blows over the rooftops,
a single wave in the ocean of air, in the immense
openness of space, with no point of reference. Suppose
that the air is folding and rolling and that it’s only
a noise, a rustling of the ether, the sudden unwinding
of a cable running out. There’ll be evening also,
laid out in the ordinary street, between the houses
made of nothing, seemingly, but a slightly denser night.
There’ll be darkness heaped at the feet of those houses,
and the channel of this street sunk deeper still,
where we shall pursue our course, step by step,
in the tides of the air and the eddies of the wind.
In this out-of-the-way neighbourhood, near noon,
there’s nothing but autumn under a wide-open sky.
Patches of sunlight are redistributing
masses in the hollow channel of the street
under the tattered arch
of a double row of trees.
The houses, slashed with zones of shadow,
create colliding angles. A crow, with
loud caws, takes possession of the world
from the top of a totemic maple, streaked
with straw-coloured and wine-red patches.
The scene is set for whatever event might
happen here, although the decor suffices.
Each house sends up a plume of smoke which
the wind beats back down on the roofs. In the
distant sky, shadow heaps upon shadow.
This is the year’s lowest point, when nothing
seems likely to begin again, nor the cold cease
to weigh on the mind numbed by this allegory
that pictures its passing. But can the word
‘cold’ cause a shiver in he who utters it?
And can this city of concrete, metal and brick
be translated to metaphor? What is there
to decipher in these streets which the snow is
blending into space paved with greyish light?
The window squares off our view
of this landscape made of one angled street
and the contrasting levels of several walls
edged with trees plunked down, it seems,
in the most complete disorder. It should
be possible to render this in every detail,
on a sheet ruled off in lines, in keeping
with the example of the designer
of a plate which Dürer used to illustrate
his treatise on perspective. But it’s all
laid out flat, with no vanishing point, on
windowpanes that also reflect the room.
A comic-strip sky, for some sunset ending,
unfurls violet banners above the street,
their contours sharp, on a ground as grey-blue
as if poured from an inkwell. The street,
almost empty at this hour, in this district,
leads straight to the narrow horizon framed
by two rows of housefronts. Two even lines
of trees trimmed back with architectural rigour