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Selected Poems

Page 12

by William Carlos Williams


  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,

 

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