whose windows offer fruit, or clothing; people
come and go; the air carries scents of pepper,
of steam, gasoline, moisture and coffee.
The window lets in the city’s sounds
from near to far: hammer blows,
heavy machinery, sirens? some Varèse.
The expressway’s far-off rumble stands
for silence, so little do we hear it. In the garden,
the birds are improvising on Messiaen.
Amongst the books, in a room organized
for solitary work, a reader is listening
to the buzzing of bees in the Latin of Petrarch:
“De remediis utriusque fortunae?” Antidotes
against the blows, either baneful or boastful,
of blind Lady Luck, whom no one escapes.
He was about to open that door, step into that room
where at last all would be revealed—when the reader
closes the book, putting off until later the rest
of the novel he’s spent some hours with. At once
the characters make their exit, and a different,
familiar room rises up again before his eyes.
There’s an armchair, a table, some other books,
and a jumble of all the things he recognizes:
a lamp, a sofa, a glass and a window.
These form a different dream, that seems real, perhaps,
only by a different convention. But who’s dreaming now,
who’s dreaming him, holding the closed book in his hands?
Strolling through the November dusk, at the end
of an endless afternoon, which is ending only,
is a chance to indulge in matchless delights.
It’s not yet night; the brightness lingers
under a sky cemented above the streets and
over housefronts vanishing towards the horizon.
It’s not day either; a grey and black fog
wafts up before our eyes as we gaze along
the row of street lights, lit up by four o’clock.
The stores are lighted; each window offers
a summary of the universe, and we stop to look,
with no purpose other than to savour time.
A few maples present an asymmetrical colonnade
unlike anything ever seen in Classical antiquity.
They’re so much more ancient, one might declare
But still … this is only a weekday morning
in the park that we cross on our way to the subway
and the noises of traffic will not let us behold
in this stretch of municipal grass the locus amœnus
of The Bucolics, or take ourselves for Tityrus,
even if, at the path’s end, philosophically, a man
out of work is crumbling a bun into a pigeon ballet,
and eight in the morning is a point in eternity too.
Sunlight casts a spray of slender branchings,
crystals of light, into space as it dips and sways,
delicately, then opens out at the intersection.
One imagines oneself in panorama, set like
an exclamation point at the centre of the colours
as in Mirò—personage and point of view—
since one’s watching oneself explore the stretch
that the eye invents on all sides. Then there
chimes in, like a symphony in a single chord,
the harpsichord of the starlings, the orchestra
of the traffic, and the perfumes, and the keen,
subtle joy sown by the shimmering brightness.
The houses leaning up against each other
offer a connected frontage of window rhythms
in the brick surfaces softened by the fog.
Sparrows clinging in the leafless trees
are fruit that no hand will gather; they
fly up and scatter as the stroller passes.
All he wants is to saunter down the slope of time,
spending at his leisure this afternoon of
a December so mild that everyone’s amazed,
but as soon as he reaches the avenue, he’ll act like
the rest, goaded by work and rushing from one line
to the next in the squares of their day planners.
“I realize I’ve got nothing to complain about … ”
she says to the friend beside her
as we pass them on the sidewalk.
She’s a woman in the street, plumpish, ordinary
no doubt, although we had only a glimpse of her
and will never know or want to know more.
It’s enough to stroll in the light, in the midst
of all that it enfolds in its softness,
it’s enough to be oneself a single note
by all these things, in this street, at this hour,
to have nothing really to complain about.
He walks slowly, limping, because his boots are
too big and blister his heels, and because he’s tramped
for so long in the street like this, not knowing where.
He sees people stepping aside to avoid him, he guesses
they’re turning to look as he passes, exclaiming at
the wake of stink that he himself no longer smells.
In both hands he’s toting torn plastic bags that he’ll
have to replace tomorrow if the trash can he’s planning
to rummage in provides no others. He no longer remembers
not having plodded, lugging these worthless things,
through streets become one endless street, in the din,
the throng, the cold, the sun, the wind and the traffic.
The crow swoops and dips, wings outspread
under the misty sky. There have to be clouds,
between two seasons, before he’ll appear.
He hangs in the air, seems to fall back,
catches himself and alights at the top of a maple,
where he sways, slowly and majestically.
The world around is made all of wind and cold,
out of the immense conch shell of space, the whole
laid out below, where he deigns to look down.
He inspects the horizon, of which he takes
possession with loud caws, then flies off
into the thickening mist, and is gone.
As soon as we step out, the cold stings.
The street seems hardened or tightened.
Space recedes in shrunken perspectives.
Instinct impels us, or habit, to pull in our heads,
and hunch our shoulders, to gather ourselves
together and offer less hold to the glacial air.
We hear nothing but the crunch of our footsteps.
An occasional car passes, underscoring
the perfect silence we’re listening to.
Hard to explain what we’re doing outdoors
in this weather, at this hour, absolutely outdoors,
and there’s no one to ask the question.
In the vastness of a hospital parking lot (this is indeed what
the moon would be like, were we on it, quintessential suburb,
suburb of the earth), a crow alights on a lamppost
reflections on the hoods, the bumpers and the chrome.
Near the emergency entrance, ambulance attendants
smoke and gossip in the chilly air. They survey
the steppe of cars that they’ve seen so often.
A few patients shepherded by family, old people
or walking like old people, shuffle very slowly away
under the monumental sky. An ambulance wheels in,
lights whirling and flashing. The crow flies off.
You’ve got to tear up these drafts you’ve copied,
which are nothing now but the sum of the errors
and approximations that you’ve tried to correct,
although it’s not without pleasure that you view the design
of crossings out, arrows, circlings, additions, scrawls
of blue or red or black ink, plus some underlinings
you don’t remember making. For what purpose
do you study your mind’s mess here, the random
chance that you tried to win—in vain, don’t you see?
You were hoping for one true word that’s neither here,
nor in those clean copies you slide into a folder and—
in their place—the just-about of your abilities.
I have built up a monument as fragile as the grass,
as unstable as the daylight, as fleeting as the air, and
as fluid as the rain we see running in the streets.
I’ve consigned it to paper that will dry, and
which may burn, or be splotched by the damp
with a bloom of pink, or green, or grey mildew,
and give off a pungent earthy odour. I’ve worked
in the transient substance of a tongue that will
cease to be spoken, sooner or later, or be pronounced
some other way, forming other words to convey
other thoughts. I’ve pledged it to the oblivion certain
to enfold all that this day bathes in its sweetness.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Melançon is one of Quebec’s most original poets. He won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his collection Blind Painting and shared the Governor General’s Award for Translation with Charlotte Melançon for their French version of A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll. A long-time translator of Canadian poet Earle Birney, Melançon has been the poetry columnist for the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir and the Radio-Canada program En Toutes Lettres. He lives in North Hatley, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Judith Cowan has translated the works of a wide range of Québecois poets, including books by Gérald Godin and Yves Préfontaine. She won the Governor General’s Award for Mirabel, her translation of Pierre Nepveu’s Lignes aériennes. The author of two collections of short stories, More Than Life Itself and Gambler’s Fallacy, she taught for many years at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, and lives in Trois-Rivières, Quebec.