Paterson (Revised Edition)
Page 4
But to conclude, you and I can do without each other, in the usual way of the sloughy habits and manners of people. I can continue with my monologue of life and death until inevitable annihilation. But it’s wrong. And as I have said, whatever snares I make for myself, I won’t weep over Poe, or Rilke, or Dickinson, or Gogol, while I turn away the few waifs and Ishmaels of the spirit in this country. I have said that the artist is an Ishmael; Call me Ishmael, says Melville in the very first line of Moby Dick; he is the wild ass of a man;—Ishmael means affliction. You see, I am always concerned with the present when I read the plaintive epitaphs in the American graveyard of literature and poetry, and in weighing the head and the heart that ached in the land, that you are not. With you the book is one thing, and the man who wrote it another. The conception of time in literature and in chronicles makes it easy for men to make such hoax cleavages. But I am getting garrulous:—
E.D.
III.
How strange you are, you idiot!
So you think because the rose
is red that you shall have the mastery?
The rose is green and will bloom,
overtopping you, green, livid
green when you shall no more speak, or
taste, or even be. My whole life
has hung too long upon a partial victory.
But, creature of the weather, I
don’t want to go any faster than
I have to go to win.
Music it for yourself.
He picked a hairpin from the floor
and stuck it in his ear, probing
around inside—
The melting snow
dripped from the cornice by his window
90 strokes a minute—
He descried
in the linoleum at his feet a woman’s
face, smelled his hands,
strong of a lotion he had used
not long since, lavender,
rolled his thumb
about the tip of his left index finger
and watched it dip each time,
like the head
of a cat licking its paw, heard the
faint filing sound it made: of
earth his ears are full, there is no sound
: And his thoughts soared
to the magnificence of imagined delights
where he would probe
as into the pupil of an eye
as through a hoople of fire, and emerge
sheathed in a robe
streaming with light. What heroic
dawn of desire
is denied to his thoughts?
They are trees
from whose leaves streaming with rain
his mind drinks of desire:
Who is younger than I?
The contemptible twig?
that I was? stale in mind
whom the dirt
recently gave up? Weak
to the wind.
Gracile? Taking up no place,
too narrow to be engraved
with the maps
of a world it never knew,
the green and
dovegrey countries of
the mind.
A mere stick that has
twenty leaves
against my convolutions.
What shall it become,
Snot nose, that I have
not been?
I enclose it and
persist, go on.
Let it rot, at my center.
Whose center?
I stand and surpass
youth’s leanness.
My surface is myself.
Under which
to witness, youth is
buried. Roots?
Everybody has roots.
We go on living, we permit ourselves
to continue—but certainly
not for the university, what they publish
severally or as a group: clerks
got out of hand forgetting for the most part
to whom they are beholden.
spitted on fixed concepts like
roasting hogs, sputtering, their drip sizzling
in the fire
Something else, something else the same.
He was more concerned, much more concerned with detaching the label from a discarded mayonnaise jar, the glass jar in which some patient had brought a specimen for examination, than to examine and treat the twenty and more infants taking their turn from the outer office, their mothers tormented and jabbering. He’d stand in the alcove pretending to wash, the jar at the bottom of the sink well out of sight and, as the rod of water came down, work with his fingernail in the splash at the edge of the colored label striving to loose the tightly glued paper. It must have been varnished over, he argued, to have it stick that way. One corner of it he’d got loose in spite of all and would get the rest presently: talking pleasantly the while and with great skill to the anxious parent.
Will you give me a baby? asked the young colored woman
in a small voice standing naked by the bed. Refused
she shrank within herself. She too refused. It makes me
too nervous, she said, and pulled the covers round her.
Instead, this:
In time of general privation
a private herd, 20 quarts of milk
to the main house and 8 of cream,
all the fresh vegetables, sweet corn,
a swimming pool, (empty!) a building
covering an acre kept heated
winter long (to conserve the plumbing)
Grapes in April, orchids
like weeds, uncut, at tropic
heat while the snow flies, left
to droop on the stem, not even
exhibited at the city show. To every
employee from the top down
the same in proportion—as many as
there are: butter daily by
the pound lot, fresh greens—even to
the gate-keeper. A special French maid,
her sole duty to groom
the pet Pomeranians—who sleep.
Cornelius Doremus, who was baptized at Acquackanonk in 1714, and died near Montville in 1803, was possessed of goods and chattels appraised at $419.58½. He was 89 years old when he died, and doubtless had turned his farm over to his children, so that he retained only what he needed for his personal comfort: 24 shirts at .82½ cents, $19.88: 5 sheets, $7.00: 4 pillow cases, $2.12: 4 pair trousers, $2.00: 1 sheet, $ 1.37½: a handkerchief, $1.75: 8 caps, .75 cents: 2 pairs shoebuckles and knife, .25 cents: 14 pairs stockings, $5.25: 2 pairs “Mittins” .63 cents: 1 linen jacket, .50 cents: 4 pairs breeches, $2.63: 4 waist coats, $3.50: 5 coats, $4.75: 1 yellow coat, $5.00: 2 hats, .25 cents: 1 pair shoes, .12½ cents: 1 chest, .75 cents: 1 large chair, $1.50: 1 chest, .12½ cents: 1 pair andirons, $2.00: 1 bed and bedding, $ 18.00: 2 pocketbooks, .37½ cents: 1 small trunk, .19½ cents: castor hat, .87½ cents: 3 reeds, $1.66: 1 “Quill wheal,” .50 cents.
Who restricts knowledge? Some say
it is the decay of the middle class
making an impossible moat between the high
and the low where
the life once flourished . . knowledge
of the avenues of information—
So that we do not know (in time)
where the stasis lodges. And if it is not
the knowledgeable idiots, the university,
they at least are the non-purveyors
should be devising means
to leap the gap. Inlets? The outward
masks of the special interests
that perpetuate the stasis and make it
profitable.
They block the release
that should cleanse and assume
prerogatives as a private recompense.
Others are also at fault because
they do nothing.
By nightfall of the 29th, acres of mud were exposed and the water mostly ha
d been drawn off. The fish did not run into the nets. But a black crowd of people could be seen from the cars, standing about under the willows, watching the men and boys on the drained lake bottom … some hundred yards in front of the dam.
The whole bottom was covered with people, and the big eels, weighing from three to four pounds each, would approach the edge and then the boys would strike at them. From this time everybody got all they wanted in a few moments.
On the morning of the 30th, the boys and men were still there. There seemed to be no end to the stock of eels especially. All through the year fine messes of fish have been taken from the lake; but nobody dreamt of the quantity that were living in it. Singularly to say not a snake had been seen. The fish and eels seemed to have monopolized the lake entirely. Boys in bathing had often reported the bottom as full of big snakes that had touched their feet and limbs but they were without doubt the eels.
Those who prepared the nets were not the ones who got the most fish. It was the hoodlums and men who leaped into the mud and water where the nets could not work that rescued from the mud and water the finest load of fish.
A man going to the depot with a peach basket gave the basket to a boy and he filled it in five minutes, deftly snapping the vertebrae back of the heads to make them stay in, and he charged the modest sum of .25 cents for the basket full of eels. The crowd increased. There were millions of fish. Wagons were sent for to carry away the heaps that lined both sides of the roadway. Little boys were dragging behind them all they could carry home, strung on sticks and in bags and baskets. There were heaps of catfish all along the walk, bunches of suckers and pike, and there were three black bass on one stick, a silk weaver had caught them. At a quarter past seven a wagon body was filled with fish and eels … four wagon loads had been carried away.
At least fifty men in the lake were hard at work and had sticks with which they struck the big eels and benumbed them as they glided along the top of the mud in shoal water, and so were able to hold them until they could carry them out: the men and boys splashed about in the mud…. Night did not put an end to the scene. All night long with lights on shore and lanterns over the mud, the work went on.
Moveless
he envies the men that ran
and could run off
toward the peripheries—
to other centers, direct—
for clarity (if
they found it)
loveliness and
authority in the world—
a sort of springtime
toward which their minds aspired
but which he saw,
within himself—ice bound
and leaped, “the body, not until
the following spring, frozen in
an ice cake”
Shortly before two o’clock August 16, 1875, Mr. Leonard Sandford, of the firm of Post and Sandford, while at work on the improvements for the water company, at the Falls, was looking into the chasm near the wheel house of the water works. He saw what looked like a mass of clothing, and on peering intently at times as the torrent sank and rose, he could distinctly see the legs of a man, the body being lodged between two logs, in a very extraordinary manner. It was in the “crotch” of these logs that the body was caught.
The sight of a human body hanging over the precipice was indeed one which was as novel as it was awful in appearance. The news of its finding attracted a very large number of visitors all that day.
What more, to carry the thing through?
Half the river red, half steaming purple
from the factory vents, spewed out hot,
swirling, bubbling. The dead bank,
shining mud .
What can he think else—along
the gravel of the ravished park, torn by
the wild workers’ children tearing up the grass,
kicking, screaming? A chemistry, corollary
to academic misuse, which the theorem
with accuracy, accurately misses . .
He thinks: their mouths eating and kissing,
spitting and sucking, speaking; a
partitype of five .
He thinks: two eyes; nothing escapes them,
neither the convolutions of the sexual orchid
hedged by fern and honey-smells, to
the last hair of the consent of the dying.
And silk spins from the hot drums to a music
of pathetic souvenirs, a comb and nail-file
in an imitation leather case—to
remind him, to remind him! and
a photograph-holder with pictures of himself
between the two children, all returned
weeping, weeping—in the back room
of the widow who married again, a vile tongue
but laborious ways, driving a drunken
husband . .
What do I care for the flies, shit with them.
I’m out of the house all day.
Into the sewer they threw the dead horse.
What birth does this foretell? I think
he’ll write a novel bye and bye .
P.Your interest is in the bloody loam but what
I’m after is the finished product.
I.Leadership passes into empire; empire begets in-
solence; insolence brings ruin.
Such is the mystery of his one two, one two.
And so among the rest he drives
in his new car out to the suburbs, out
by the rhubarb farm—a simple thought—
where the convent of the Little Sisters of
St. Ann pretends a mystery
What
irritation of offensively red brick is this,
red as poor-man’s flesh? Anachronistic?
The mystery
of streets and back rooms—
wiping the nose on sleeves, come here
to dream . .
Tenement windows, sharp edged, in which
no face is seen—though curtainless, into
which no more than birds and insects look or
the moon stares, concerning which they dare
look back, by times.
It is the complement exact of vulgar streets,
a mathematic calm, controlled, the architecture
mete, sinks there, lifts here .
the same blank and staring eyes.
An incredible
clumsiness of address,
senseless rapes—caught on hands and knees
scrubbing a greasy corridor; the blood
boiling as though in a vat, where they soak—
Plaster saints, glass jewels
and those apt paper flowers, bafflingly
complex—have here
their forthright beauty, beside:
Things, things unmentionable,
the sink with the waste farina in it and
lumps of rancid meat, milk-bottle-tops: have
here a tranquility and loveliness
Have here (in his thoughts)
a complement tranquil and chaste.
He shifts his change:
“The 7th December, this year, (1737) at night, was a large shock of an earthquake, accompanied with a remarkable rumbling noise; people waked in their beds, the doors flew open, bricks fell from the chimneys; the consternation was serious, but happily no great damage ensued.”
Thought clambers up,
snail like, upon the wet rocks
hidden from sun and sight—
hedged in by the pouring torrent—
and has its birth and death there
in that moist chamber, shut from
the world—and unknown to the world,
cloaks itself in mystery—
And the myth
that holds up the rock,
that holds up the water thrives there—
in that cavern, that profound cleft,
a flickering green
inspiring terror, watching . .
An
d standing, shrouded there, in that din,
Earth, the chatterer, father of all
speech . . . . . . . .
N.B. “In order apparently to bring the meter still more within the sphere of prose and common speech, Hipponax ended his iambics with a spondee or a trochee instead of an iambus, doing thus the utmost violence to the rhythmical structure. These deformed and mutilated verses were called χωλίαμβοι or ϊαμβοι бϰάζοντες (lame or limping iambics). They communicated a curious crustiness to the style. The choliambi are in poetry what the dwarf or cripple is in human nature. Here again, by their acceptance of this halting meter, the Greeks displayed their acute aesthetic sense of propriety, recognizing the harmony which subsists between crabbed verses and the distorted subjects with which they dealt—the vices and perversions of humanity—as well as their agreement with the snarling spirit of the satirist. Deformed verse was suited to deformed morality.”
—Studies of the Greek Poets, John Addington Symonds
Vol. I, p. 284
BOOK TWO
(1948)
Sunday in the Park
I.
Outside
outside myself
there is a world,
he rumbled, subject to my incursions
—a world
(to me) at rest,
which I approach
concretely—
The scene’s the Park
upon the rock,
female to the city
—upon whose body Paterson instructs his thoughts (concretely)
—late spring,
a Sunday afternoon!
—and goes by the footpath to the cliff (counting: the proof)
himself among the others,
—treads there the same stones
on which their feet slip as they climb,
paced by their dogs!
laughing, calling to each other—
Wait for me!
. . the ugly legs of the young girls,
pistons too powerful for delicacy! .
the men’s arms, red, used to heat and cold,
to toss quartered beeves and .