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

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
    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:
    â€œDe 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