Paterson (Revised Edition) Read online

  When the word was given to haul the bridge across the chasm, the crowd rent the air with cheers. But they had only pulled it half way over when one of the rolling pins slid from the ropes into the water below.

  While all were expecting to see the big, clumsy bridge topple over and land in the chasm, as quick as a flash a form leaped out from the highest point and struck with a splash in the dark water below, swam to the wooden pin and brought it ashore. This was the starting point of Sam Patch’s career as a famous jumper. I saw that, said the old man with satisfaction, and I don’t believe there is another person in the town today who was an eye-witness of that scene. These were the words that Sam Patch said: “Now, old Tim Crane thinks he has done something great; but I can beat him.” As he spoke he jumped.

  There’s no mistake in Sam Patch!

  The water pouring still

  from the edge of the rocks, filling

  his ears with its sound, hard to interpret.

  A wonder!

  After this start he toured the West, his only companions a fox and a bear which he picked up in his travels.

  He jumped from a rocky ledge at Goat Island into the Niagara River. Then he announced that before returning to the Jerseys he was going to show the West one final marvel. He would leap 125 feet from the falls of the Genesee River on November 13, 1829. Excursions came from great distances in the United States and even from Canada to see the wonder.

  A platform was built at the edge of the falls. He went to great trouble to ascertain the depth of the water below. He even successfully performed one practice leap.

  On the day the crowds were gathered on all sides. He appeared and made a short speech as he was wont to do. A speech! What could he say that he must leap so desperately to complete it? And plunged toward the stream below. But instead of descending with a plummet-like fall his body wavered in the air—Speech had failed him. He was confused. The word had been drained of its meaning. There’s no mistake in Sam Patch. He struck the water on his side and disappeared.

  A great silence followed as the crowd stood spellbound.

  Not until the following spring was the body found frozen in an ice-cake.

  He threw his pet bear once from the cliff overlooking the Niagara rapids and rescued it after, down stream.

  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 . .

&
nbsp; 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 they

  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—

  While at 10,000 feet, coming in over

  the sombre mountains of Haiti, the land-locked

  bay back of Port au Prince, blue vitreol

  streaked with paler streams, shabby as loose

  hair, badly dyed—like chemical waste

  mixed in, eating out the shores . .

  He pointed it down and struck the rough

  waters of the bay, hard; but lifted it again and

  coming down gradually, hit again hard but

  remained down to taxi to the pier where

  they were waiting—

  (Thence Carlos had fled in the 70’s

  leaving the portraits of my grandparents,

  the furniture, the silver, even the meal

  hot upon the table before the Revolutionists

  coming in at the far end of the street.)

  I was over to see my mother today. My sister, “Billy,” was at the schoolhouse. I never go when she is there. My mother had a sour stomach, yesterday. I found her in bed. However, she had helped “Billy” do up the work. My mother has always tried to do her part, and she is always trying to do something for her children. A few days before I left I found her starting to mend my trousers. I took them away from her and said, “Mother, you can’t do that for me, with your crippled head. You know, I always get Louisa or Mrs. Tony to do that work for me.” “Billy” looked up and said, “It’s too bad about you.”

  I have already told you I helped with the work, did dishes, three times daily, swept and mopped floors, porches and cleaned yards, mowed the lawn, tarred the roofs, did repair work and helped wash, brought in the groceries and carried out the pots and washed them each morning, even “Billy’s” with dung in it, sometimes, and did other jobs and then it was not uncommon for “Billy” to say: “You don’t do anything here.” Once she even said, “I saw you out there the other morning sweeping porches, pretending you were doing something.”

  Of course, “Billy” has been chopped on by the surgical chopper and has gone through the menopause and she had a stroke of facial paralysis, but she has always been eccentric and wanted to boss. My Hartford sister said she used to run over her until she became big enough to throsh her. I have seen her slap her husband square in the face. I would have knocked her so far she would not have got back in a week. She has run at me with a poker, etc., but I always told her not to strike, “Don’t make that mistake,” I would always caution.

  “Billy” is a good worker and thorough going but she wants to lay blame—always on the other fellow. I told my buddie, in Hartford, she was just like our landlady, THE PISTOL. He said he had a sister just like that.

  As to my mother, she is obsessed with fire. That’s why she doesn’t want me to stay there, alone, when she is dead. The children have all said for years, she thinks more of me than any child she has.

  T.


  They fail, they limp with corns. I

  think he means to kill me, I don’t know

  what to do. He comes in after midnight,

  I pretend to be asleep. He stands there,

  I feel him looking down at me, I

  am afraid!

  Who? Who? Who? What?

  A summer evening?

  A quart of potatoes, half a dozen oranges,

  a bunch of beets and some soup greens.

  Look, I have a new set of teeth. Why you

  look ten years younger .

  But never, in despair and anxiety,

  forget to drive wit in, in till it discover

  his thoughts, decorous and simple,

  and never forget that though his thoughts

  are decorous and simple, the despair

  and anxiety: the grace and detail of

  a dynamo—

  So in his high decorum he is wise.

  A delirium of solutions, forthwith, forces

  him into back streets, to begin again:

  up hollow stairs among acrid smells

  to obscene rendezvous. And there he finds

  a festering sweetness of red lollipops—

  and a yelping dog:

  Come YEAH, Chichi! Or a great belly

  that no longer laughs but mourns

  with its expressionless black navel love’s

  deceit . .

  They are the divisions and imbalances

  of his whole concept, made weak by pity,

  flouting desire; they are—No ideas but

  in the facts . .

  I positively feel no rancour against you, but will urge you toward those vapory ends, and implore you to submit to your own myths, and that any postponement in doing so is a lie for you. Delay makes us villainous and cheap: All that I can say of myself and of others is that it matters not so much how a man lies or fornicates or even loves money, provided that he has not a Pontius Pilate but an hungered Lazarus in his intestines. Once Plotinus asked, “What is philosophy?” and he replied, “What is most important.” The late Miguel de Unamuno also cried out, not “More light, more light!” as Goethe did when he was dying, but “More warmth, more warmth!” I hate more than anything else the mocking stone bowels of Pilate; I abhor that more than cozening and falsehoods and the little asps of malice that are on all carnal tongues. That is why I am attacking you, as you put it, not because I think you cheat or lie for pelf, but because you lie and chafe and gull whenever you see a jot of the torn Galilean in a man’s intestines. You hate it; it makes you writhe; that’s why all the Americans so dote upon that canaille word, extrovert. Of course, nature in you knows better as some very lovely passages that you have written show.