Selected Poems
Page 13
unattached, floating like a pigeon
after a long flight to his cote.
. . .
II
There is no direction. Whither? I
cannot say. I cannot say
more than how. The how (the howl) only
is at my disposal (proposal) : watching—
colder than stone .
a bud forever green,
tight-curled, upon the pavement, perfect
in juice and substance but divorced, divorced
from its fellows, fallen low—
Divorce is
the sign of knowledge in our time,
divorce! divorce!
with the roar of the river
forever in our ears (arrears)
inducing sleep and silence, the roar
of eternal sleep . . challenging
our waking—
—unfledged desire, irresponsible, green,
colder to the hand than stone,
unready—challenging our waking:
Two halfgrown girls hailing hallowed Easter,
(an inversion of all out-of-doors) weaving
about themselves, from under
the heavy air, whorls of thick translucencies
poured down, cleaving them away,
shut from the light: bare-
headed, their clear hair dangling—
Two—
disparate among the pouring
waters of their hair in which nothing is
molten—
two, bound by an instinct to be the same:
ribbons, cut from a piece,
cerise pink, binding their hair: one—
a willow twig pulled from a low
leafless bush in full bud in her hand,
(or eels or a moon!)
holds it, the gathered spray,
upright in the air, the pouring air,
strokes the soft fur—
Ain’t they beautiful!
Certainly I am not a robin nor erudite,
no Erasmus nor bird that returns to the same
ground year by year. Or if I am . .
the ground has undergone
a subtle transformation, its identity altered.
Indians!
Why even speak of “I,” he dreams, which
interests me almost not at all?
The theme
is as it may prove: asleep, unrecognized—
all of a piece, alone
in a wind that does not move the others—
in that way: a way to spend
a Sunday afternoon while the green bush shakes.
. . a mass of detail
to interrelate on a new ground, difficultly;
an assonance, a homologue
triple piled
pulling the disparate together to clarify
and compress
the river, curling, full—as a bush shakes
and a white crane will fly
and settle later! White, in
the shallows among the blue-flowered
pickerel-weed, in summer, summer! if it should
ever come, in the shallow water!
On the embankment a short,
compact cone (juniper)
that trembles frantically
in the indifferent gale: male—stands
rooted there .
The thought returns: Why have I not
but for imagined beauty where there is none
or none available, long since
put myself deliberately in the way of death?
Stale as a whale’s breath: breath!
Breath!
Patch leaped but Mrs. Cumming shrieked
and fell—unseen (though
she had been standing there beside her husband half
an hour or more twenty feet from the edge).
: a body found next spring
frozen in an ice-cake; or a body
fished next day from the muddy swirl—
both silent, uncommunicative
Only of late, late! begun to
know, to know clearly (as through clear ice) whence
I draw my breath or how to employ it
clearly if not well:
Clearly!
speaks the red-breast his behest. Clearly!
clearly!
—and watch, wrapt! one branch
of the tree at the fall’s edge, one
mottled branch, withheld,
among the gyrate branches
of the waist-thick sycamore,
sway less, among the rest, separate, slowly
with giraffish awkwardness, slightly
on a long axis, so slightly
as hardly to be noticed, in itself the tempest:
Thus
the first wife, with giraffish awkwardness
among thick lightnings that stab at
the mystery of a man: in sum, a sleep, a
source, a scourge .
on a log, her varnished hair
trussed up like a termite’s nest (forming
the lines) and, her old thighs
gripping the log reverently, that,
all of a piece, holds up the others—
alert: begin to know the mottled branch
that sings .
certainly NOT the university,
a green bud fallen upon the pavement its
sweet breath suppressed: Divorce (the
language stutters)
unfledged:
two sisters from whose open mouths
Easter is born—crying aloud,
Divorce!
While
the green bush sways: is whence
I draw my breath, swaying, all of a piece,
separate, livens briefly, for the moment
unafraid . .
Which is to say, though it be poorly
said, there is a first wife
and a first beauty, complex, ovate—
the woody sepals standing back under
the stress to hold it there, innate
a flower within a flower whose history
(within the mind) crouching
among the ferny rocks, laughs at the names
by which they think to trap it. Escapes!
Never by running but by lying still—
A history that has, by its den in the
rocks, bole and fangs, its own cane-brake
whence, half hid, canes and stripes
blending, it grins (beauty defied)
not for the sake of the encyclopedia.
Were we near enough its stinking breath
would fell us. The temple upon
the rock is its brother, whose majesty
lies in jungles—made to spring,
at the rifle-shot of learning: to kill
and grind those bones:
These terrible things they reflect:
the snow falling into the water,
part upon the rock, part in the dry weeds
and part into the water where it
vanishes—its form no longer what it was:
the bird alighting, that pushes
its feet forward to take up the impetus
and falls forward nevertheless
among the twigs. The weak-necked daisy
bending to the wind . . .
The sun
winding the yellow bindweed about a
bush; worms and gnats, life under a stone.
The pitiful snake with its mosaic skin
and frantic tongue. The horse, the bull
the whole din of fracturing thought
as it falls tinnily to nothing upon the streets
and the absurd dignity of a locomotive
hauling freight—
Pithy philosophies of
daily exits and entrances, with books
propping up one end of the shaky table—
The vague accuracies of events dancing two
and two with language which the
y
forever surpass—and dawns
tangled in darkness—
The giant in whose apertures we
cohabit, unaware of what air supports
us—the vague, the particular
no less vague
his thoughts, the stream
and we, we two, isolated in the stream,
we also: three alike—
we sit and talk
I wish to be with you abed, we two
as if the bed were the bed of a stream
—I have much to say to you
We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech; to
go to bed with you, to pass beyond
the moment of meeting, while the
currents float still in mid-air, to
fall—
with you from the brink, before
the crash—
to seize the moment.
We sit and talk, sensing a little
the rushing impact of the giants’
violent torrent rolling over us, a
few moments.
If I should demand it, as
it has been demanded of others
and given too swiftly, and you should
consent. If you would consent
We sit and talk and the
silence speaks of the giants
who have died in the past and have
returned to those scenes unsatisfied
and who is not unsatisfied, the
silent, Singac the rock-shoulder
emerging from the rocks—and the giants
live again in your silence and
unacknowledged desire—
And the air lying over the water
lifts the ripples, brother
to brother, touching as the mind touches,
counter-current, upstream
brings in the fields, hot and cold
parallel but never mingling, one that whirls
backward at the brink and curls invisibly
upward, fills the hollow, whirling,
an accompaniment—but apart, observant of
the distress, sweeps down or up clearing
the spray—
brings in the rumors of separate
worlds, the birds as against the fish, the grape
to the green weed that streams out undulant
with the current at low tide beside the
bramble in blossom, the storm by the flood—
song and wings—
one unlike the other, twin
of the other, conversant with eccentricities
side by side, bearing the water-drops
and snow, vergent, the water soothing the air when
it drives in among the rocks fitfully—
. . .
Sunday in the Park
(From Book Two)
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 .
Yah! Yah! Yah! Yah!
—over-riding
the risks:
pouring down!
For the flower of a day!
Arrived breathless, after a hard climb he,
looks back (beautiful but expensive!) to
the pearl-grey towers! Re-turns
and starts, possessive, through the trees,
— that love,
that is not, is not in those terms
to which I’m still the positive
in spite of all;
the ground dry,— passive-possessive
Walking—
Thickets gather about groups of squat sand-pine,
all but from bare rock . .
—a scattering of man-high cedars (sharp cones),
antlered sumac .
—roots, for the most part, writhing
upon the surface
(so close are we to ruin every
day!)
searching the punk-dry rot
Walking—
The body is tilted slightly forward from the basic standing position and the weight thrown on the ball of the foot, while the other thigh is lifted and the leg and opposite arm are swung forward (fig. 6B). Various muscles, aided .
Despite my having said that I’d never write to you again, I do so now because I find, with the passing of time, that the outcome of my failure with you has been the complete damming up of all my creative capacities in a particularly disastrous manner such as I have never before experienced.
For a great many weeks now (whenever I’ve tried to write poetry) every thought I’ve had, even every feeling, has been struck off some surface crust of myself which began gathering when I first sensed that you were ignoring the real contents of my last letters to you, and which finally congealed into some impenetrable substance when you asked me to quit corresponding with you altogether without even an explanation.
That kind of blockage, exiling one’s self from one’s self—have you ever experienced it? I dare say you have, at moments; and if so, you can well understand what a serious psychological injury it amounts to when turned into a permanent day-to-day condition.
How do I love you? These!
(He hears! Voices . indeterminate! Sees them
moving, in groups, by twos and fours— filtering
off by way of the many bypaths.)
I asked him, What do you do?
He smiled patiently, The typical American question.
In Europe they would ask, What are you doing? Or,
What are you doing now?
What do I do? I listen, to the water falling. (No
sound of it here but with the wind!) This is my entire
occupation.
No fairer day ever dawned anywhere than May 2, 1880, when the German Singing Societies of Paterson met on Garret Mountain, as they did many years before on the first Sunday in May.
However the meeting of 1880 proved a fatal day, when William Dalzell, who owned a piece of property near the scene of the festivities, shot John Joseph Van Houten. Dalzell claimed that the visitors had in previous years walked over his garden and was determined that this year he would stop them from crossing any part of his grounds.
Immediately after the shot the quiet group of singers was turned into an infuriated mob who would take Dalzell into their own hands. The mob then proceeded to burn the barn into which Dalzell had retreated from the angry group.
Dalzell fired at the approaching mob from a window in the barn and one of the bullets struck a little girl in the cheek…. Some of the Paterson Police rushed Dalzell out of the barn [to] the house of John Ferguson some half furlong away.
The crowd now numbered some ten thousand,
“a great beast!”
for many had come from the city to join the
conflict. The case looked serious, for the Police were gre
atly outnumbered. The crowd then tried to burn the Ferguson house and Dalzell went to the house of John McGuckin. While in this house it was that Sergeant John McBride suggested that it might be well to send for William McNulty, Dean of Saint Joseph’s Catholic Church.
In a moment the Dean set on a plan. He proceeded to the scene in a hack. Taking Dalzell by the arm, in full view of the infuriated mob, he led the man to the hack and seating himself by his side, ordered the driver to proceed. The crowd hesitated, bewildered between the bravery of the Dean and .
Signs everywhere of birds nesting, while
in the air, slow, a crow zigzags
with heavy wings before the wasp-thrusts
of smaller birds circling about him
that dive from above stabbing for his eyes
Walking—
he leaves the path, finds hard going
across-field, stubble and matted brambles
seeming a pasture—but no pasture .
—old furrows, to say labor sweated or
had sweated here .
a flame,
spent.
The file-sharp grass .
When! from before his feet, half tripping,
picking a way, there starts .
a flight of empurpled wings!
—invisibly created (their
jackets dust-grey) from the dust kindled
to sudden ardor!
They fly away, churring! until
their strength spent they plunge
to the coarse cover again and disappear
—but leave, livening the mind, a flashing
of wings and a churring song .
AND a grasshopper of red basalt, boot-long,
tumbles from the core of his mind,
a rubble-bank disintegrating beneath a
tropic downpour
Chapultepec! grasshopper hill!
—a matt stone solicitously instructed
to bear away some rumor
of the living presence that has preceded
it, out-precedented its breath .
These wings do not unfold for flight—
no need!
the weight (to the hand) finding
a counter-weight or counter buoyancy
by the mind’s wings .
He is afraid! What then?
Before his feet, at each step, the flight
is renewed. A burst of wings, a quick
churring sound :
couriers to the ceremonial of love!
—aflame in flight!
—aflame only in flight!
No flesh but the caress!
He is led forward by their announcing wings.
If that situation with you (your ignoring those particular letters and then your final note) had belonged to the inevitable lacrimae rerum (as did, for instance, my experience with Z.) its result could not have been (as it has been) to destroy the validity for me myself of myself, because in that case nothing to do with my sense of personal identity would have been maimed—the cause of one’s frustrations in such instances being not in one’s self nor in the other person but merely in the sorry scheme of things. But since your ignoring those letters was not “natural” in that sense (or rather since to regard it as unnatural I am forced, psychologically, to feel that what I wrote you about, was sufficiently trivial and unimportant and absurd to merit your evasion) it could not but follow that that whole side of life connected with those letters should in consequence take on for my own self that same kind of unreality and inaccessibility which the inner lives of other people often have for us.