Paterson (Revised Edition) (4 page)

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 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.

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.

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.