Paterson (Revised Edition) Read online

  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 .