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For as Far as the Eye Can See
I shall settle for the paradise of what I see ... this rectangle of twelve lines ... a window.
- GenresPoetry
152 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2004
2 people are currently reading
9 people want to read
About the author
Robert Melançon
15 books2 followersRobert 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.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 10, 2015
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?
[...]
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.
do you study your mind’s mess here, the random
chance that you tried to win—in vain, don’t you see?
[...]
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.
January 21, 2022
Snow, over roofs, and trees, and the ground,
in answer to the wash-tint that stands for sky,
is brighter than this inky light of day.
Between the post office chimney and
the radio tower, a pigeon's tracing
a hyperbole, erased behind him as he flies.
A wire-running squirrel has followed
the telephone line across to the maple tree,
of which he's exploring the ramifications.
One might search in vain for any other event
in this theatre reduced to almost nothing,
enclosed by mounting tiers of brick houses.
* * *
A sphere of silence enfolds all
these stories we're walking past, crossing
by turns through blocks of shadow and puddles
of brightness falling from street lights
and shop windows. It's as if the air were filling
with vague rustlings, with fleeting
movements arising from nothing.
from whisperings. The signs blink yellow, pink,
and purple. The eyes of the mannequins
stare into infinity; it's a point somewhere
out there in space. They've been posed in
deliberately banal tableaux vivants.
* * *
We walk through streets we know
or used to know ... the eye
collides with walls that were not here
when first we ventured out,
unwittingly, into this labyrinth;
a vacant lot which now we see only
in recollection, was over there,
where a tower of blue glass rises, a cube
of hardened sky. But a parking lot
offers an opening that lets us see,
at afternoon's end, the orb of a sun
which we are pleased to recognize.
* * *
The progress of sunlight along the wall
may be read as a sign the wind is rising;
it might be the glow of a burning house.
In the depths of philosophy's cave,
the shades whom Plato locked in must have seen
movements like these, so lovely.
The frenzied ballet of the birds suggests
they're announcing a storm, the first squall
of this summer so little like summer.
Heavy clouds jostle and bump along
a horizon suddenly solid as concrete,
then space fills up with a thick rain.
* * *
We see the rain in the sphere of brightness
cast by a street light near a rowan tree.
We hear its ongoing whisper as water
patters over the leaves and splashes
on the roadway; we listen with pleasure to
its periodic murmur, infinitely reassuring;
we watch the endless weaving of the raindrops
through the air, over the roofs, the trees, the street.
The whole night is filled with its susurrus
which dwindles, then swells again, returning
like some inexorable trampling, soft-footed
and coming from all sides at the same time.
* * *
A revolving light flashes amongst traffic signals
in the street spangled with windows,
at the hour when offices are emptying;
it's some small drama, a fender crunched, not worthy
so much as a line in tomorrow morning's paper.
The closed sky presses the night down
over this scene having all the appearances of the fake,
and which it is, irredeemably. What are you doing
here, walled in by so much shoddy stuff?
Darkness streams down across the windshield, swept
at intervals by reflections from the street lights, while
you drive down the disorderly street that is your life.
* * *
This we read in a newspaper which smudges our fingers:
cosmologists have discovered that the world
is in accelerated expansion, or so they say,
into infinity. Lucretius knew as much as that
and as little; from the fall of everything
in every way, all is done and all undone.
The sun in the wet grass light up
as many stars as the eye can see;
a flock of starlings wheels, opens out,
gathers again and plunges into an elm which
instantly fills with chirping. The scent of newsprint
mingles with the odour of damp earth.
* * *
A comic-strip sky, for some sunset ending,
unfurls violet banners above the street,
their contours sharp, on a ground as grey-blue
as if poured from an inkwell. The street,
almost empty at this hour, in this district,
leads straight to the narrow horizon framed
by two rows of housefronts. Two even lines
of trees trimmed back with architectural rigour
vanish in parallel. We walk through ideal urban
planning purged of nature and every irregularity,
towards we know not what, blissfully ignorant
bu borne up by this perfectly oriented space.
* * *
Patches of sunlight on the blind,
mingled with shadows more or less dense,
produce an effect, as in the cave,
or on a movie screen, of a shadow of
something that may be only a shadow
or, a Plotinus thought, a chain
of increasingly tattered shadows.
The wind has cleared the sky of
the veil of haze that was clouding it.
We've raised the blind, opened the curtains
and gaze into an illusion of blue infinity
that stretches out and away, away, away.
* * *
All is given at every instant in the space that
unfolds for the glance forever unwearied
of seeing what there is to see. Once can begin
anywhere and follow the tremors of the light
beneath the sky's ever-present vault
where a cloud of birds in wheeling.
The wind shakes the shadows on the walls
still holding day's glow. Time does not pass.
It has never passed, since Achilles never does
catch up with the tortoise, since we never see but
that which is painted before our eyes: this street,
this rustle of sunlight blending into the air.
in answer to the wash-tint that stands for sky,
is brighter than this inky light of day.
Between the post office chimney and
the radio tower, a pigeon's tracing
a hyperbole, erased behind him as he flies.
A wire-running squirrel has followed
the telephone line across to the maple tree,
of which he's exploring the ramifications.
One might search in vain for any other event
in this theatre reduced to almost nothing,
enclosed by mounting tiers of brick houses.
- pg. 1
* * *
A sphere of silence enfolds all
these stories we're walking past, crossing
by turns through blocks of shadow and puddles
of brightness falling from street lights
and shop windows. It's as if the air were filling
with vague rustlings, with fleeting
movements arising from nothing.
from whisperings. The signs blink yellow, pink,
and purple. The eyes of the mannequins
stare into infinity; it's a point somewhere
out there in space. They've been posed in
deliberately banal tableaux vivants.
- pg. 13
* * *
We walk through streets we know
or used to know ... the eye
collides with walls that were not here
when first we ventured out,
unwittingly, into this labyrinth;
a vacant lot which now we see only
in recollection, was over there,
where a tower of blue glass rises, a cube
of hardened sky. But a parking lot
offers an opening that lets us see,
at afternoon's end, the orb of a sun
which we are pleased to recognize.
- pg. 25
* * *
The progress of sunlight along the wall
may be read as a sign the wind is rising;
it might be the glow of a burning house.
In the depths of philosophy's cave,
the shades whom Plato locked in must have seen
movements like these, so lovely.
The frenzied ballet of the birds suggests
they're announcing a storm, the first squall
of this summer so little like summer.
Heavy clouds jostle and bump along
a horizon suddenly solid as concrete,
then space fills up with a thick rain.
- pg. 35
* * *
We see the rain in the sphere of brightness
cast by a street light near a rowan tree.
We hear its ongoing whisper as water
patters over the leaves and splashes
on the roadway; we listen with pleasure to
its periodic murmur, infinitely reassuring;
we watch the endless weaving of the raindrops
through the air, over the roofs, the trees, the street.
The whole night is filled with its susurrus
which dwindles, then swells again, returning
like some inexorable trampling, soft-footed
and coming from all sides at the same time.
- pg. 42
* * *
A revolving light flashes amongst traffic signals
in the street spangled with windows,
at the hour when offices are emptying;
it's some small drama, a fender crunched, not worthy
so much as a line in tomorrow morning's paper.
The closed sky presses the night down
over this scene having all the appearances of the fake,
and which it is, irredeemably. What are you doing
here, walled in by so much shoddy stuff?
Darkness streams down across the windshield, swept
at intervals by reflections from the street lights, while
you drive down the disorderly street that is your life.
- pg. 56
* * *
This we read in a newspaper which smudges our fingers:
cosmologists have discovered that the world
is in accelerated expansion, or so they say,
into infinity. Lucretius knew as much as that
and as little; from the fall of everything
in every way, all is done and all undone.
The sun in the wet grass light up
as many stars as the eye can see;
a flock of starlings wheels, opens out,
gathers again and plunges into an elm which
instantly fills with chirping. The scent of newsprint
mingles with the odour of damp earth.
- pg. 67
* * *
A comic-strip sky, for some sunset ending,
unfurls violet banners above the street,
their contours sharp, on a ground as grey-blue
as if poured from an inkwell. The street,
almost empty at this hour, in this district,
leads straight to the narrow horizon framed
by two rows of housefronts. Two even lines
of trees trimmed back with architectural rigour
vanish in parallel. We walk through ideal urban
planning purged of nature and every irregularity,
towards we know not what, blissfully ignorant
bu borne up by this perfectly oriented space.
- pg. 77
* * *
Patches of sunlight on the blind,
mingled with shadows more or less dense,
produce an effect, as in the cave,
or on a movie screen, of a shadow of
something that may be only a shadow
or, a Plotinus thought, a chain
of increasingly tattered shadows.
The wind has cleared the sky of
the veil of haze that was clouding it.
We've raised the blind, opened the curtains
and gaze into an illusion of blue infinity
that stretches out and away, away, away.
- pg. 84
* * *
All is given at every instant in the space that
unfolds for the glance forever unwearied
of seeing what there is to see. Once can begin
anywhere and follow the tremors of the light
beneath the sky's ever-present vault
where a cloud of birds in wheeling.
The wind shakes the shadows on the walls
still holding day's glow. Time does not pass.
It has never passed, since Achilles never does
catch up with the tortoise, since we never see but
that which is painted before our eyes: this street,
this rustle of sunlight blending into the air.
- pg. 94
September 16, 2013
I actually had the privilege of meeting and listening to Robert.
Each poem in his collection is written in remembrance of sonnets. His book consists of 144 poems written in a "rectangle of twelve lines". They address the everyday and in that they are profound observations!
He read first in English as the audience was mostly english and then in French; nothing could have been more beautiful!
Each poem in his collection is written in remembrance of sonnets. His book consists of 144 poems written in a "rectangle of twelve lines". They address the everyday and in that they are profound observations!
He read first in English as the audience was mostly english and then in French; nothing could have been more beautiful!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews