The waning moon above the fir tree
seems to overhang a landscape that bears
the name only because we have given it.
Landscape? The snow rounds off rooflines,
the snow does away with gardens, the snow
makes a halo round that moon. Landscape?
None of this resembles anything the word evokes.
This is nothing but a construct of faint marks:
some brick walls without windows,
the bluish humps and hollows in the snow,
a street light shining on nothing but branches
outlined with frost, and white everywhere.
We take another look at our invitation; yes,
this is the place. Through the windows, in fact,
we see small groups of people talking.
As soon as we’re through the door, we’re swallowed
up in a blur of babble. It’s obvious no one
can hear anything at all. But that doesn’t matter.
Being here is enough, being seen here is enough.
With a look, with a nod of our heads, we greet
those who wish us to see that they’re here as well.
A voice calls for silence, there’ll be a short speech;
the publisher greets the authors, who smile, and then
the din of voices resumes. This is a book launch.
The movement from night to day
and from day to night cannot,
in winter, be called twilight;
that should be a grander spectacle
than this imperceptible passage
from dark grey to light grey,
or from blinding blue-white
to the greyish white still giving off,
in full dark, a shadow of brightness.
All melts away with the hyperbolic restraint
heard in the playing of Glenn Gould
in his last recordings.
The junction of two zones of colour
draws a conceptual line, understood as
the meeting of two walls, at right angles.
At the bottom, an isoceles triangle suggests
the fictional depth of a space
made up entirely of patches.
On a trapezoid that stands for a table,
teardrops, circles and ovals are fruit
of a flavour which no one will taste
and flowers without perfume. A bee
that does not buzz forever approaches a rose
whose petals fall in dribbles of pigment.
A wave or tongue of snow laps over the edge
of the roof, which metamorphoses into white china
on which the insect one has turned into, crawls,
then flies off into open space, just as white.
Such was the dream or its setting. But one does not know
if the cat, perhaps a stuffed toy, that was sitting
at the window, or if the trial, which was about to begin
in a vacant lot at the moment when one awoke,
were connected in a linkage of cause and effect.
Or rather, one is sure of it; it all held together,
although it all crumbles very rapidly
as the familiar room resumes its shape.
Consider the disorder of your life
in the clutter on this table:
reports, minutes of meetings, agendas,
an ashtray, The Tusculanes, some pens,
a writing pad … the result is a collage
rather than a vanitas; what’s missing is a skull,
an overturned goblet, an hourglass or a watch.
At the window, the sun’s painting on the pane
in imitation of the illusion of depth
created by perspective, a landscape of levels
(streets, snow, roofs, the bluish air) into whose
vanishing you allow your eye to wander.
How can the moon, instead of a cardboard
cut-out, be an astral whiteness lighting up
the winter night like a different sort of day?
In the street, the snow scatters stars
through which we walk, which we can touch,
while from the windows separate worlds
shine out: the cosmos of each house
and of each partitioned room.
Snow covers the street and gardens
The snow is impure, grey and shadowy;
lewdly, it stretches out beneath the moon.
Vertical strokes map out the space
and provide us with depth perception:
some chimneys, some trees and poles,
the wires stretching between them, the edges
of buildings enhanced by the sunlight
and framing a broken horizon line.
A swath of blue takes all the upper part.
A flagpole with its flag stretched out
lets us know it’s windy, while the progress
of shadows marks the passage of the hours,
which a painter might render by varying
the angle of the sun, if he wanted to show it all.
The earth reappears as it was when we left it
at the end of autumn in the garden
which the snow was about to cover up.
We hesitate to walk there since every step
would leave a print pressed into the mud
where soon the grass will be springing up.
In a scant square metre, where archipelagos
of ice are pretending to be continents, we
observe the outline of another possible world,
with other seas and other rivers which
would need names, and which we might inhabit
as we do this one, under the same sun.
High above the cornices and chimneys
springtime’s unfurling a sky of streaky
clouds splashed with the whole spectrum.
We’ve just passed the equinox, and walk
down the widened street towards the calm days
of the solstice, towards the schoolboys’ sun.
A puddle left behind by March picks up
in pink and green the space the sunrise
is repainting earlier and earlier every day.
And in this mirror we can almost see,
between the cars misted with dew,
islands, and golden domes, and towers.
A wash of sunlight tints a concrete wall
uninterrupted by any window, any outcrop.
It can’t be said that the sun colours it,
so delicate is its hue, it’s hardly noticeable,
but at last we see it, this wall we’ve never looked at,
even if we walk right past it every day.
Later, we’ll think back to its loveliness,
and the antique splendour that it raises up,
pink and peach, like an Etruscan tombstone in Umbria,
upon which we might decipher an epitaph—
because we’ve walked through a park where the snow
is flooded with the same ochre-tinted sunlight.
It’s simply seeing what’s in front of our eyes,
including the vanishing or collapse of everything
on every side: this theatre which we find
before us and around us, through which we walk,
tipping the horizon and turning the houses,
the walls, the trees, the grass and the street.
At every instant, it’s all rearranged to allow
a complete event to take place; the air is painted
with sunlight, with damp, with dust; then
walls divide the space where a public bench
is placed, or a bus stop, or some signs, and
passers-by step in at once to play their roles.
The crown of an elm rises into the night like a big
broccoli; we see lawns perfumed
with pesticides
under a half-moon that looks like a bitten cookie
hanging above the lines of streets; it’s summer
in this city where, at this season, living is so sweet.
We hear lawn sprinklers, nighthawks and,
from a house converted to a Baptist chapel,
cries, because there’s a service and the faithful
are speaking in tongues, or the Holy Ghost through them.
The street lights punctuate the humid darkness
with a double line of suspension points …
over that way are other streets, all just the same.
Between the piers a stretch of quiet water
resembles plaster on the point of setting
or lead on the point of melting.
Barges labour past, leaving wakes
that seem almost like furrows
in a soaked soil at the end of autumn.
Twilight touches them with golden flecks
which mirror and fragment a sky that
might have been painted by Claude, or by Turner.
Above the rampart of the buildings
that block the nearer view, domes, towers
and spires melt into the vanishing sun.
Children’s cries rise from the garden,
an outpouring of joy such that it verges
on grief, the kind of laughter that might melt
into tears for nothing or very little, so
close does the pure joy of living come
to a sorrow without name or reason.
In the green, green grass, a ball
becomes a second sun, to be captured,
under the enormous sky where big
bellying clouds parade, and birds,
and a plane that’s another bird
to be imitated, running, with outstretched arms.
The reader who’s lifted his eyes from his book
perceives the sky above as the true ocean,
the immense expanse of blue enclosing
the whole earth, at whose end we might tumble
out of everything, should we ever find that end.
An enormous white cloud appears as
the crest of foam on a wave; it breaks and
streams in tatters while a pair of gulls fly through
the hollow space where blue ebbs and flows.
Before picking up the thread of the sentence
where he left off, this reader will have scanned
a summer afternoon’s supreme iambic.
That’s his cry we hear: tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet …
A cardinal’s proclaiming his possession
of the street. There’s no need to search for long
to catch sight of the scarlet patch he makes
at the top of an aspen; he’s turned towards
the river, which we see at the foot of the slope,
over a factory district that the eight o’clock
sunlight is slathering, for the moment,
with the Arcadian softness of Claude.
As far as the horizon crenellated with towers
stretches a zone of rail lines and vacant lots:
his domain, soon to be buzzing with insects.
Ahead, always ahead, arises the day, the night,
the evening and, we imagine without proof,
that it’s the same behind, that from this whole
a concave space is formed, within whose centre,
under a perfect dome, we settle in, arranging
the streets and their people all around us.
But it’s never more than a screen, set on the retina,
with all the rest painted in. Quick as we turn around,
we never glimpse the nothingness that sinks away behind,
and which no mirror, a screen if ever was, can show.
Between the buildings the people press on, each one
pushing his world ahead, without looking back.
The stubborn bass of the crickets endlessly repeats
four notes that we hear through the humid night
at August’s end, trying in vain to sleep. We listen
to the few cars trailing a rumble that swells,
then fades away, as a counterpoint of nighthawks’
cries enters in, or a distant siren, or footsteps,
or a breath in the trees, or the curtains rustling.
We hear other sounds too, confused and vague,
dreamt up in the slight delirium that arises always
from insomnia, but the true murmur of the world,
should one heed, even a little, its glorious orchestration,
at once covers over their too predictible monotony.
The rain arrives, familiar, expected, in an act
so close we touch the space that it enshrouds.
It descends like memory, green and grey,
forest, sea and street mingled in the cold light
that adorns each object with fresh details;
it comes nearer, repetitive, inexorable
as childhood was, with a rustling like the curtain
one draws at evening to enclose the room
and its swarm of dreams; it murmurs
a single word, repeated indefinitely, that
we cannot quite grasp, that we divine
or foresee, which is the secret name of time.
Sitting on the ground by the trash can, he stinks up
the subway entrance, calling out in confusion
to people passing, who know where they’re going.
No one listens to his drunken, drugged-out
monologue—who could?—and no one
spares more than a sidelong glance for his
fumbling gestures, his pitiable efforts
to struggle to his feet, the looks he casts
at the incomprehensible mess around him.
He’s a tangle of misery, a child of the slime,
made in the shape and image of their God, and
the police will shortly come and collect him.
As soon as the blind is raised, on which
only whitish rectangles were outlined
by the crosspieces, the landscape unfolds:
trees appear, the street, some zones of blue;
over the roadway is a tracery of branches
with the shadows of birds flying through.
Plotinus believed the eye sees only images
derived from inconceivable archetypes, but
the glance by instinct shuns the burning sun.
In the bathroom, when from the mirror’s depths
we see a stranger looking out at us, we understand
that we’re nothing but a knot, coming undone.
There’s no better dancer than the aspen leaf,
its supple stalks the longest, the slenderest of the legs
to flicker in the green majesty of high summer’s light.
From a distance, perhaps at the far end of a field,
an aspen looks to be fluttering thousands of flags,
like a strip-mall lot on a suburban boulevard
amongst expressways, motels, garbage dumps and lawns.
But that’s beside the point, and a slight effort will
help us recover some commonplaces of the poetic tradition
such as “lamp—the aspen is the lamp of the solstice,” etc.
or “a vertical river, a shower of reflections, a standing fire,” etc.
But we prefer “dancer” or better still, “the quaking aspen leaf.”
In the light of eight o’clock in the morning,
at the bus stop, people are waiting, lost
in thought and gazing at the sunlight
that washes down over the housefronts
on the other side of the street, and the cars
that go by, stop for the red light, and move on.
A woman clutches her bag under her elbow;
a teenager’s beating time to the noises
heard crackling out of his Walkman;
a man’s reading a newspaper and worrying
about rumours of war, to take place, it is thought,
a long way from here, in the evening, on television.
The blind’s pallor hints at a clear sky.
It’s never so blue, one never sees it so well
as at this season, through the trees’ bare bones,
the light shining past unhindered by leaves,
of which there remain just enough to prick out
space with a stippling of red and yellow patches.
You do not raise this blind, not wanting the real landscape
(but what is real?) to cancel immediately
the one you are inventing. Then you give in …
and at once there unfolds, vast, motionless and blue,
the vista of the light, but which could not be painted
without an edging of shadows, and there are none.
What we see first is a stretch of rumpled clouds.
There’s no white-albed angel passing through
amongst the birds, and therefore none is seen.
Lowering our eyes, we see the brick houses,
each at the end of its garden, covered
with the leaves no longer seen on the trees.
As for the trees, what we see are their branches;
they’re joined to the upper parts of the trunks
by their branchings, appropriately named.
One might add the chimneys and the telephone wires,
but we shall not mention the wind; one does not see
the wind, and we shall speak only of what is seen.
We take a fresh look at the bark of the trees
now that the parasol of leaves no longer blocks
the light that’s streaming down their trunks.
Under the sky’s ruins, a colonnade has arisen
along the streets, and it leads forever
into the white dusk of November’s end.
This is no temple, nor has it been deserted
by any gods who never passed here.
This is a neighbourhood with shops