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

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
    them entirely new, bathed in the light of beginnings.
    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.
    â€œI 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
    and nothing more, in the concert created
    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