Selected Poems
Page 12
but
it remained a wheat field
over which the
wind played
men with scythes tumbling
the wheat in
rows
the gleaners already busy
it was his own—
magpies
the patient horses no one
could take that
from him
VII THE CORN HARVEST
Summer!
the painting is organized
about a young
reaper enjoying his
noonday rest
completely
relaxed
from his morning labors
sprawled
in fact sleeping
unbuttoned
on his back
the women
have brought him his lunch
perhaps
a spot of wine
they gather gossiping
under a tree
whose shade
carelessly
he does not share the
resting
center of
their workaday world
VIII THE WEDDING DANCE IN THE OPEN AIR
Disciplined by the artist
to go round
& round
in holiday gear
a riotously gay rabble of
peasants and their
ample-bottomed doxies
fills
the market square
featured by the women in
their starched
white headgear
they prance or go openly
toward the wood’s
edges
round and around in
rough shoes and
farm breeches
mouths agape
Oya!
kicking up their heels
IX THE PARABLE OF THE BLIND
This horrible but superb painting
the parable of the blind
without a red
in the composition shows a group
of beggars leading
each other diagonally downward
across the canvas
from one side
to stumble finally into a bog
where the picture
and the composition ends back
of which no seeing man
is represented the unshaven
features of the des-
titute with their few
pitiful possessions a basin
to wash in a peasant
cottage is seen and a church spire
the faces are raised
as toward the light
there is no detail extraneous
to the composition one
follows the others stick in
hand triumphant to disaster
X CHILDREN’S GAMES
I
This is a schoolyard
crowded
with children
of all ages near a village
on a small stream
meandering by
where some boys
are swimming
bare-ass
or climbing a tree in leaf
everything
is motion
elder women are looking
after the small
fry
a play wedding a
christening
nearby one leans
hollering
into
an empty hogshead
II
Little girls
whirling their skirts about
until they stand out flat
tops pinwheels
to run in the wind with
or a toy in 3 tiers to spin
with a piece
of twine to make it go
blindman’s-buff follow the
leader stilts
high and low tipcat jacks
bowls hanging by the knees
standing on your head
run the gauntlet
a dozen on their backs
feet together kicking
through which a boy must pass
roll the hoop or a
construction
made of bricks
some mason has abandoned
III
The desperate toys
of children
their
imagination equilibrium
and rocks
which are to be
found
everywhere
and games to drag
the other down
blindfold
to make use of
a swinging
weight
with which
at random
to bash in the
heads about
them
Brueghel saw it all
and with his grim
humor faithfully
recorded
it
Song
beauty is a shell
from the sea
where she rules triumphant
till love has had its way with her
scallops and
lion’s paws
sculptured to
the tune of retreating waves
undying accents
repeated till
the ear and the eye lie
down together in the same bed
The Woodthrush
fortunate man it is not too late
the woodthrush
flies into my garden
before the snow
he looks at me silent without
moving
his dappled breast reflecting
tragic winter
thoughts my love my own
The Polar Bear
his coat resembles the snow
deep snow
the male snow
which attacks and kills
silently as it falls muffling
the world
to sleep that
the interrupted quiet return
to lie down with us
its arms
about our necks
murderously a little while
The Dance
When the snow falls the flakes
spin upon the long axis
that concerns them most intimately-
two and two to make a dance
the mind dances with itself,
taking you by the hand,
your lover follows
there are always two,
yourself and the other,
the point of your shoe setting the pace,
if you break away and run
the dance is over
Breathlessly you will take
another partner
better or worse who will keep
at your side, at your stops
whirls and glides until he too
leaves off
on his way down as if
there were another direction
gayer, more carefree
spinning face to face but always down
with each other secure
only in each other’s arms
But only the dance is sure!
make it your own.
Who can tell
what is to come of it?
in the woods of your
own nature whatever
twig interposes, and bare twigs
have an actuality of their own
this flurry of the storm
that holds us,
plays with us and discards us
dancing, dancing as may be credible.
Jersey Lyric
view of winter trees
before
one tree
in the foreground
where
by fresh-fallen
snow
lie 6 woodchunks ready
for the fire
To the Ghost o
f Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
To celebrate your brief life
as you lived it grimly
under attack as it happens
to any common soldier
black or white
surrounded by the heavy scent
of orange blossoms solitary
in your low-lying farm among the young trees
Wise and gentle-voiced
old colored women
attended you among the reeds
and polonia
with its blobs of purple
flowers your pup smelling of
skunk beside your grove-men
lovesick maids and
one friend of the same sex
who knew how to handle a boat in a swamp
Your quick trips to your
New York publisher
beating your brains out
over the composition
under the trees to the tune
of a bull got loose
gathering the fruit and
preparing new fields to be put under the plough
You lived nerves drawn
tense beside dogtooth violets
bougainvillaea swaying
rushes and yellow jasmine
that smells so sweet
young and desperate
as you were taking chances
sometimes that you should be
thrown from the saddle
and get your neck broke
as it must have happened and it did in the end
Sonnet in Search an Author
Nude bodies like peeled logs
sometimes give off a sweetest
odor, man and woman
under the trees in full excess
matching the cushion of
aromatic pine-drift fallen
threaded with trailing woodbine
a sonnet might be made of it
Might be made of it! odor of excess
odor of pine needles, odor of
peeled logs, odor of no odor
other than trailing woodbine that
has no odor, odor of a nude woman
sometimes, odor of a man.
Paterson
(1946-58)
Paterson
(From Book One)
Preface
“Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?”
To make a start,
out of particulars
and make them general, rolling
up the sum, by defective means—
Sniffing the trees,
just another dog
among a lot of dogs. What
else is there? And to do?
The rest have run out—
after the rabbits.
Only the lame stands—on
three legs. Scratch front and back.
Deceive and eat. Dig
a musty bone
For the beginning is assuredly
the end—since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.
Yet there is
no return: rolling up out of chaos,
a nine months’ wonder, the city
the man, an identity—it can’t be
otherwise—an
interpenetration, both ways. Rolling
up! obverse, reverse;
the drunk the sober; the illustrious
the gross; one. In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing.
(The multiple seed,
packed tight with detail, soured,
is lost in the flux and the mind,
distracted, floats off in the same
scum)
Rolling up, rolling up heavy with
numbers.
It is the ignorant sun
rising in the slot of
hollow suns risen, so that never in this
world will a man live well in his body
save dying—and not know himself
dying; yet that is
the design. Renews himself
thereby, in addition and subtraction,
walking up and down.
and the craft,
subverted by thought, rolling up, let
him beware lest he turn to no more than
the writing of stale poems …
Minds like beds always made up,
(more stony than a shore)
unwilling or unable.
Rolling in, top up,
under, thrust and recoil, a great clatter:
lifted as air, boated, multicolored, a
wash of seas—
from mathematics to particulars—
divided as the dew,
floating mists, to be rained down and
regathered into a river that flows
and encircles:
shells and animalcules
generally and so to man,
to Paterson.
The Delineaments of the Giants
I
Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.
Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom
seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his
machinations
drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring
river
animate a thousand automatons. Who because they
neither know their sources nor the sills of their
disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly
for the most part,
locked and forgot in their desires—unroused.
—Say it, no ideas but in things—
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident—
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—
secret—into the body of the light!
From above, higher than the spires, higher
even than the office towers, from oozy fields
abandoned to grey beds of dead grass,
black sumac, withered weed-stalks,
mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves—
the river comes pouring in above the city
and crashes from the edge of the gorge
in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists—
(What common language to unravel?
. . combed into straight lines
from that rafter of a rock’s
lip.)
A man like a city and a woman like a flower
—who are in love. Two women. Three women.
Innumerable women, each like a flower.
But
only one man—like a city.
In regard to the poems I left with you; will you be so kind as to return them to me at my new address? And without bothering to comment upon them if you should find that embarrassing—for it was the human situation and not the literary one that motivated my phone call and visit.
Besides, I know myself to be more the woman than the poet; and to concern myself less with the publishers of poetry than with … living …
But they set up an investigation … and my doors are bolted forever (I hope forever) against all public welfare workers, professional do-gooders and the like.
Jostled as are the waters approaching
the brink, his thoughts
interlace, repel and cut under,
rise rock-thwarted and turn aside
but forever strain forward—or strike
an eddy and whirl, marked by a
leaf or curdy spume, seeming
to fo
rget .
Retake later the advance and
are replaced by succeeding hordes
pushing forward—they coalesce now
glass-smooth with their swiftness,
quiet or seem to quiet as at the close
they leap to the conclusion and
fall, fall in air! as if
floating, relieved of their weight,
split apart, ribbons; dazed, drunk
with the catastrophe of the descent
floating unsupported
to hit the rocks: to a thunder,
as if lightning had struck
All lightness lost, weight regained in
the repulse, a fury of
escape driving them to rebound
upon those coming after—
keeping nevertheless to the stream, they
retake their course, the air full
of the tumult and of spray
connotative of the equal air, coeval,
filling the void
And there, against him, stretches the low mountain.
The Park’s her head, carved, above the Falls, by the quiet
river; Colored crystals the secret of those rocks;
farms and ponds, laurel and the temperate wild cactus,
yellow flowered . . facing him, his
arm supporting her, by the Valley of the Rocks, asleep.
Pearls at her ankles, her monstrous hair
spangled with apple-blossoms is scattered about into
the back country, waking their dreams—where the deer run
and the wood-duck nests protecting his gallant plumage.
. . .
I remember
a Geographic picture, the 9 women
of some African chief semi-naked
astraddle a log, an official log to
be presumed, heads left:
Foremost
froze the young and latest,
erect, a proud queen, conscious of her power,
mud-caked, her monumental hair
slanted above the brows—violently frowning.
Behind her, packed tight up
in a descending scale of freshness
stiffened the others
and then . .
the last, the first wife,
present! supporting all the rest growing
up from her—whose careworn eyes
serious, menacing—but unabashed; breasts
sagging from hard use . .
Whereas the uppointed breasts
of that other, tense, charged with
pressures unrelieved
and the rekindling they bespoke
was evident.
Not that the lightnings
do not stab at the mystery of a man
from both ends—and the middle, no matter
how much a chief he may be, rather the more
because of it, to destroy him at home
. . Womanlike, a vague smile,