Paterson (Revised Edition) Read online

  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 greatly 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.

  —his mind a red stone carved to be

  endless flight

  Love that is a stone endlessly in flight,

  so long as stone shall last bearing

  the chisel’s stroke

  . . and is lost and covered

  with ash, falls from an undermined bank

  and—begins churring!

  AND DOES, the stone after the life!

  The stone lives, the flesh dies

  —we know nothing of death.

  —boot long

  window-eyes that fr
ont the whole head,

  Red stone! as if

  a light still clung in them .

  Love

  combating sleep

  ___________

  the sleep

  piecemeal

  Shortly after midnight, August 20, 1878, special officer Goodridge, when in front of the Franklin House, heard a strange squealing noise down towards Ellison Street. Running to see what was the matter, he found a cat at bay under the water table at Clark’s hardware store on the corner, confronting a strange black animal too small to be a cat and entirely too large for a rat. The officer ran up to the spot and the animal got in under the grating of the cellar window, from which it frequently poked its head with a lightning rapidity. Mr. Goodridge made several strikes at it with his club but was unable to hit it. Then officer Keyes came along and as soon as he saw it, he said it was a mink, which confirmed the theory that Mr. Goodridge had already formed. Both tried for a while to hit it with their clubs but were unable to do so, when finally officer Goodridge drew his pistol and fired a shot at the animal. The shot evidently missed its mark, but the noise and powder so frightened the little joker that it jumped out into the street, and made down into Ellison Street at a wonderful gait, closely followed by the two officers. The mink finally disappeared down a cellar window under the grocery store below Spangermacher’s lager beer saloon, and that was the last seen of it. The cellar was examined again in the morning, but nothing further could be discovered of the little critter that had caused so much fun.

  Without invention nothing is well spaced,

  unless the mind change, unless

  the stars are new measured, according

  to their relative positions, the

  line will not change, the necessity

  will not matriculate: unless there is

  a new mind there cannot be a new

  line, the old will go on

  repeating itself with recurring

  deadliness: without invention

  nothing lies under the witch-hazel

  bush, the alder does not grow from among

  the hummocks margining the all

  but spent channel of the old swale,

  the small foot-prints

  of the mice under the overhanging

  tufts of the bunch-grass will not

  appear: without invention the line

  will never again take on its ancient

  divisions when the word, a supple word,

  lived in it, crumbled now to chalk.

  Under the bush they lie protected

  from the offending sun—

  11 o’clock

  They seem to talk

  —a park, devoted to pleasure: devoted to . grasshoppers!

  3 colored girls, of age! stroll by

  —their color flagrant,

  their voices vagrant

  their laughter wild, flagellant, dissociated

  from the fixed scene .

  But the white girl, her head

  upon an arm, a butt between her fingers

  lies under the bush . .

  Semi-naked, facing her, a sunshade

  over his eyes,

  he talks with her

  —the jalopy half hid

  behind them in the trees—

  I bought a new bathing suit, just

  pants and a brassiere :

  the breasts and

  the pudenda covered—beneath

  the sun in frank vulgarity.

  Minds beaten thin

  by waste—among

  the working classes SOME sort

  of breakdown

  has occurred. Semi-roused

  they lie upon their blanket

  face to face,

  mottled by the shadows of the leaves

  upon them, unannoyed,

  at least here unchallenged.

  Not undignified. . .

  talking, flagrant beyond all talk

  in perfect domesticity—

  And having bathed

  and having eaten (a few

  sandwiches)

  their pitiful thoughts do meet

  in the flesh—surrounded

  by churring loves! Gay wings

  to bear them (in sleep)

  —their thoughts alight,

  away

  . . among the grass

  Walking —

  across the old swale—a dry wave in the ground

  tho’ marked still by the line of Indian alders

  . . they (the Indians) would weave

  in and out, unseen, among them along the stream

  . come out whooping between the log

  house and men working the field, cut them

  off! they having left their arms in the block-

  house, and—without defense—carry them away

  into captivity. One old man .

  Forget it! for God’s sake, Cut

  out that stuff .

  Walking —

  he rejoins the path and sees, on a treeless

  knoll—the red path choking it—

  a stone wall, a sort of circular

  redoubt against the sky, barren and

  unoccupied. Mount. Why not?

  A chipmunk,

  with tail erect, scampers among the stones.

  (Thus the mind grows, up flinty pinnacles)

  . but as he leans, in his stride,

  at sight of a flint arrow-head

  (it is not)

  —there

  in the distance, to the north, appear

  to him the chronic hills .

  Well, so they are.

  He stops short:

  Who’s here?

  To a stone bench, to which she’s leashed, within the wall a man in tweeds—a pipe hooked in his jaw—is combing out a new-washed Collie bitch. The deliberate comb-strokes part the long hair—even her face he combs though her legs tremble slightly—until it lies, as he designs, like ripples in white sand giving off its clean-dog odor. The floor, stone slabs, she stands patiently before his caresses in that bare “sea chamber”

  . to the right

  from this vantage, the observation tower

  in the middle distance stands up prominently

  from its pubic grove

  DEAR B. Please excuse me for not having told you this when I was over to your house. I had no courage to answer your questions so I’ll write it. Your dog is going to have puppies although I prayed she would be okey. It wasn’t that she was left alone as she never was but I used to let her out at dinner time while I hung up my clothes. At the time, it was on a Thursday, my mother-in-law had some sheets and table cloths out on the end of the line. I figured the dogs wouldn’t come as long as I was there and none came thru my yard or near the apartment. He must have come between your hedge and the house. Every few seconds I would run to the end of the line or peek under the sheets to see if Musty was alright. She was until I looked a minute too late. I took sticks and stones after the dog but he wouldn’t beat it. George gave me plenty of hell and I started praying that I had frightened the other dog so much that nothing had happened. I know you’ll be cursing like a son-of-a-gun and probably won’t ever speak to me again for not having told you. Don’t think I haven’t been worrying about Musty. She’s occupied my mind every day since that awful event. You won’t think so highly of me now and feel like protecting me. Instead I’ll bet you could kill …

  And still the picnickers come on, now

  early afternoon, and scatter through the

  trees over the fenced-in acres .

  Voices!

  multiple and inarticulate . voices

  clattering loudly to the sun, to

  the clouds. Voices!

  assaulting the air gaily from all sides.

  —among which the ear strains to catch

  the movement of one voice among the rest

  —a reed-like voice

  of peculiar accent

  Thus she finds what peace there is, reclines,


  before his approach, stroked

  by their clambering feet—for pleasure

  It is all for

  pleasure . their feet . aimlessly

  wandering

  The “great beast” come to sun himself

  as he may

  . . their dreams mingling,

  aloof

  Let us be reasonable!

  Sunday in the park,

  limited by the escarpment, eastward; to

  the west abutting on the old road: recreation

  with a view! the binoculars chained

  to anchored stanchions along the east wall—

  beyond which, a hawk

  soars!

  —a trumpet sounds fitfully.

  Stand at the rampart (use a metronome

  if your ear is deficient, one made in Hungary

  if you prefer)

  and look away north by east where the church

  spires still spend their wits against

  the sky . to the ball-park

  in the hollow with its minute figures running

  —beyond the gap where the river

  plunges into the narrow gorge, unseen

  —and the imagination soars, as a voice

  beckons, a thundrous voice, endless

  —as sleep: the voice

  that has ineluctably called them—

  that unmoving roar!

  churches and factories

  (at a price)

  together, summoned them from the pit .

  —his voice, one among many (unheard)

  moving under all.

  The mountain quivers.

  Time! Count! Sever and mark time!

  So during the early afternoon, from place

  to place he moves,

  his voice mingling with other voices

  —the voice in his voice

  opening his old throat, blowing out his lips,

  kindling his mind (more

  than his mind will kindle)

  —following the hikers.

  At last he comes to the idlers’ favorite

  haunts, the picturesque summit, where

  the blue-stone (rust-red where exposed)

  has been faulted at various levels

  (ferns rife among the stones)

  into rough terraces and partly closed in

  dens of sweet grass, the ground gently sloping.

  Loiterers in groups straggle

  over the bare rock-table—scratched by their

  boot-nails more than the glacier scratched

  them—walking indifferent through

  each other’s privacy .

  —in any case,

  the center of movement, the core of gaiety.