Paterson (Revised Edition) (2 page)

: a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column; a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands; a gathering up; a celebration;

in distinctive terms; by multiplication a reduction to one; daring; a fall; the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice; an enforced pause;

hard put to it; an identification and a plan for action to supplant a plan for action; a taking up of slack; a dispersal and a metamorphosis.

“Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?”

To make a start,

out of particulars

and make them general, rolling

up the sum, by defective means—

Sniffing the trees,

just another dog

among a lot of dogs. What

else is there? And to do?

The rest have run out—

after the rabbits.

Only the lame stands—on

three legs. Scratch front and back.

Deceive and eat. Dig

a musty bone

For the beginning is assuredly

the end—since we know nothing, pure

and simple, beyond

our own complexities.

Yet there is

no return: rolling up out of chaos,

a nine months’ wonder, the city

the man, an identity—it can’t be

otherwise—an

interpenetration, both ways. Rolling

up! obverse, reverse;

the drunk the sober; the illustrious

the gross; one. In ignorance

a certain knowledge and knowledge,

undispersed, its own undoing.

(The multiple seed,

packed tight with detail, soured,

is lost in the flux and the mind,

distracted, floats off in the same

scum)

Rolling up, rolling up heavy with

numbers.

It is the ignorant sun

rising in the slot of

hollow suns risen, so that never in this

world will a man live well in his body

save dying—and not know himself

dying; yet that is

the design. Renews himself

thereby, in addition and subtraction,

walking up and down.

and the craft,

subverted by thought, rolling up, let

him beware lest he turn to no more than

the writing of stale poems   .   .   .

Minds like beds always made up,

(more stony than a shore)

unwilling or unable.

Rolling in, top up,

under, thrust and recoil, a great clatter:

lifted as air, boated, multicolored, a

wash of seas—

from mathematics to particulars—

divided as the dew,

floating mists, to be rained down and

regathered into a river that flows

and encircles:

shells and animalcules

generally and so to man,

to Paterson.

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls

its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He

lies on his right side, head near the thunder

of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,

his dreams walk about the city where he persists

incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.

Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom

seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his

machinations

drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring

river

animate a thousand automatons. Who because they

neither know their sources nor the sills of their

disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly

for the most part,

locked and forgot in their desires—unroused.

—Say it, no ideas but in things—

nothing but the blank faces of the houses

and cylindrical trees

bent, forked by preconception and accident—

split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—

secret—into the body of the light!

From above, higher than the spires, higher

even than the office towers, from oozy fields

abandoned to grey beds of dead grass,

black sumac, withered weed-stalks,

mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves—

the river comes pouring in above the city

and crashes from the edge of the gorge

in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists—

(What common language to unravel?

.   .   combed into straight lines

from that rafter of a rock’s

lip.)

A man like a city and a woman like a flower

—who are in love. Two women. Three women.

Innumerable women, each like a flower.

But

only one man—like a city.

In regard to the poems I left with you; will you be so kind as to return them to me at my new address? And without bothering to comment upon them if you should find that embarrassing—for it was the human situation and not the literary one that motivated my phone call and visit.

Besides, I know myself to be more the woman than the poet; and to concern myself less with the publishers of poetry than with … living …

But they set up an investigation … and my doors are bolted forever (I hope forever) against all public welfare workers, professional do-gooders and the like.

Jostled as are the waters approaching

the brink, his thoughts

interlace, repel and cut under,

rise rock-thwarted and turn aside

but forever strain forward—or strike

an eddy and whirl, marked by a

leaf or curdy spume, seeming

to forget   .

Retake later the advance and

are replaced by succeeding hordes

pushing forward—they coalesce now

glass-smooth with their swiftness,

quiet or seem to quiet as at the close

they leap to the conclusion and

fall, fall in air! as if

floating, relieved of their weight,

split apart, ribbons; dazed, drunk

with the catastrophe of the descent

floating unsupported

to hit the rocks: to a thunder,

as if lightning had struck

All lightness lost, weight regained in

the repulse, a fury of

escape driving them to rebound

upon those coming after—

keeping nevertheless to the stream, they

retake their course, the air full

of the tumult and of spray

connotative of the equal air, coeval,

filling the void

And there, against him, stretches the low mountain.

The Park’s her head, carved, above the Falls, by the quiet

river; Colored crystals the secret of those rocks;

farms and ponds, laurel and the temperate wild cactus,

yellow flowered   .   .   facing him, his

arm supporting her, by the
Valley of the Rocks
, asleep.

Pearls at her ankles, her monstrous hair

spangled with apple-blossoms is scattered about into

the back country, waking their dreams—where the deer run

and the wood-duck nests protecting his gallant plumage.

In February 1857, David Hower, a poor shoemaker with a large family, out of work and money, collected a lot of mussels from Notch Brook near the City of Paterson. He found in eating them many hard substances. At first he threw them away but at last submitted some of them to a jeweler who gave him twenty-five to thirty dollars for the lot. Later he found others. One pearl of fine lustre was sold to Tiffany for $900 and later to the Empress Eugenie for $2,000 to be known thenceforth as the “Queen Pearl,” the finest of its sort in the world today.

News of this sale created such excitement that search for the pearls was started throughout the country. The Unios (mussels) at Notch Brook and elsewhere were gathered by the millions and destroyed often with little or no result. A large round pearl, weighing 400 grains which would have been the finest pearl of modern times, was ruined by boiling open the shell.

Twice a month Paterson receives

communications from the Pope and Jacques

Barzun

(Isocrates). His works

have been done into French

and Portuguese. And clerks in the post-

office ungum rare stamps from

his packages and steal them for their

childrens’ albums   .

Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr.

Paterson has gone away

to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees

his thoughts sitting and standing. His

thoughts alight and scatter—

Who are these people (how complex

the mathematic) among whom I see myself

in the regularly ordered plateglass of

his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?

They walk incommunicado, the

equation is beyond solution, yet

its sense is clear—that they may live

his thought is listed in the Telephone

Directory—

And derivatively, for the Great Falls,

PISS-AGH! the giant lets fly! good
Muncie
, too

They craved the miraculous!

A gentleman of the Revolutionary Army, after describing the Falls, thus describes another natural curiosity then existing in the community: In the afternoon we were invited to visit another curiosity in the neighborhood. This is a monster in human form, he is twenty-seven years of age, his face from the upper part of his forehead to the end of his chin, measures
twenty-seven inches
, and around the upper part of his head is twenty-one inches: his eyes and nose are remarkably large and prominent, chin long and pointed. His features are coarse, irregular and disgusting, his voice rough and sonorous. His body is twenty-seven inches in length, his limbs are small and much deformed, and he has the use of one hand only. He has never been able to sit up, as he cannot support the enormous weight of his head; but he is constantly in a large cradle, with his head supported on pillows. He is visited by great numbers of people, and is peculiarly fond of the company of clergymen, always inquiring for them among his visitors, and taking great pleasure in receiving religious instruction. General Washington made him a visit, and asked “whether he was a Whig or a Tory.” He replied that he had never taken an
active
part on either side.

A wonder! A wonder!

From the ten houses Hamilton saw when he looked (at the falls!) and kept his counsel, by the middle of the century—the mills had drawn a heterogeneous population. There were in 1870, native born 20,711, which would of course include children of foreign parents; foreign 12,868 of whom 237 were French, 1,420 German, 3,343 English—(Mr. Lambert who later built the Castle among them), 5,124 Irish, 879 Scotch, 1,360 Hollanders and 170 Swiss—

Around the falling waters the Furies hurl!

Violence gathers, spins in their heads summoning

them:

The twaalft, or striped bass was also abundant, and even sturgeon, of a huge bigness, were frequently caught:—On Sunday, August 31, 1817, one seven feet six inches long, and weighing 126 pounds, was captured a short distance below the Falls basin. He was pelted with stones by boys until he was exhausted, whereupon one of them, John Winters, waded into the water and clambered on the back of the huge fish, while another seized him by the throat and gills, and brought him ashore. The
Bergen Express and. Paterson Advertiser
of Wednesday, September 3, 1817, devoted half a column to an account of the incident, under the heading, “The Monster Taken.”

They begin!

The perfections are sharpened

The flower spreads its colored petals

wide in the sun

But the tongue of the bee

misses them

They sink back into the loam

crying out

—you may call it a cry

that creeps over them, a shiver

as they wilt and disappear:

Marriage come to have a shuddering

implication

Crying out

or take a lesser satisfaction:

a few go

to the Coast without gain—

The language is missing them