For As Far as the Eye Can See by Robert MelanCon Read Free Book Online

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