Read Paterson (Revised Edition) Online
Authors: William Carlos Williams
Uranium, the complex atom, breaking
down, a city in itself, that complex
atom, always breaking down .
to lead.
But giving off that, to an
exposed plate, will reveal .
And so, with coarsened hands
she stirs
And love, bitterly contesting, waits
that the mind shall declare itself not
alone in dreams .
A man like you should have everything he wants .
not half asleep
waiting for the sun to part the labia
of shabby clouds . but a man (or
a woman) achieved
flagrant!
adept at thought, playing the words
following a table which is the synthesis
of thought, a symbol that is to him,
sun up! a Mendelief, the elements laid
out by molecular weight, identity
predicted before found! and .
Oh most powerful connective, a bead
to lie between continents through
which a string passes .
Ah Madam!
this is order, perfect and controlled
on which empires, alas, are built
But there may issue, a contaminant,
some other metal radioactive
a dissonance, unless the table lie,
may cure the cancer . must
lie in that ash . Helium plus, plus
what? Never mind, but plus . a
woman, a small Polish baby-nurse
unable .
Woman is the weaker vessel, but
the mind is neutral, a bead linking
continents, brow and toe
and will at best take out
its spate in mathematics
replacing murder
Sappho vs Elektra!
The young conductor gets his orchestra
and leaves his patroness
with child.
. les idées Wilsoniennes nous
gâtent
. the vague irrelevances
and the destructive silences
inertia
As Carrie Nation
to Artemis
so is our life today .
They took her out West on a photographing
expedition
to study chiaroscuro
to Denver, I think.
Somewhere around there .
the marriage
was annulled. When she returned
with the baby
openly
taking it to her girls’ parties, they
were shocked
—and the Abbess Hildegard, at her own
funeral, Rupertsberg, 1179
had enjoined them to sing the choral, all
women, she had written for the occasion
and it was done, the peasants kneeling
in the background . as you may see
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The Constitution says:
To borrow money on the credit of the United States.
It does not say: To borrow money from Private bankers.
To explain the fallacies and illusions upon which our present method of financing the national budget is based would take too much space and time. To win the cold war we must reform our finance system. The Russians understand only force. We must be stronger than they and build more airplanes.
FINANCE THE BUILDING OF AIRPLANES AS FOLLOWS:
WHAT DO WE ACCOMPLISH BY USING THIS SYSTEM?
I would like to have some smart economist or banker stick out his neck and contradict one single claim I present herewith to the nation.
ENFORCE THE CONSTITUTION ON MONEY
August Walters, Newark, N. J.
MONEY : JOKE (i.e., crime
under the circumstances : value
chipped away at accelerated pace.)
— do you joke when a man is dying
of a brain tumor?
Take up the individual misfortune
by buffering it into the locality — not
penalize him with surgeon’s fees
and accessories at an advance over the
market price for
“hospital income”
Who gets that? The poor?
What poor?
— at $8.50 a day, ward rate?
short of the possibility of recovery
And not enrich the widow either
long past fertility
Money: Uranium (bound to be lead)
throws out the firez .
— the radium’s the credit — the wind in
the trees, the hurricane in the
palm trees, the tornado that lifts
oceans .
Trade winds that broached a continent
drive the ship forward .
Money sequestered enriches avarice, makes
poverty: the direct cause of
disaster .
while the leak drips
Let out the fire, let the wind go!
Release the Gamma rays that cure the cancer
. the cancer, usury. Let credit
out . out from between the bars
before the bank windows
. credit, stalled
in money, conceals the generative
that thwarts art or buys it (without
understanding), out of poverty of
wit, to win, vicariously, the blue ribbon
to win
the Congressional Medal
for bravery beyond the call of duty but
not to end as a bridge-tender
on government dole .
Defeat may steel us
in knowledge : money : joke
to be wiped out sooner or later at stroke
of pen .
. just because they ain’t no water fit to drink in that spot (or you ain’t found none) don’t mean there ain’t no fresh water to be had NOWHERE . .
—and to Tolson
and to his ode and to Liberia and to Allen Tate
(Give him credit)
and to the South generally
Selah!
— and to 100 years of it — splits
off the radium, the Gamma rays
will eat their bastard bones out who
are opposed
Selah!
Pobres bastardos, misquierdos
Pobrecitos
Ay! que pobres
— yuh wanna be killed with your
face in the dirt and a son-of-a-bitch
of a
Guardia Civil
giving you the
coup de (dis) grace
right in the puss . ?
Selah! Selah!
Credit! I hope you have a long credit
and a dirty one
Selah!
What is credit?
the Parthenon
What is money?
the gold entrusted to Phideas for the
statue of Pallas Athena, that he “put aside” for private purposes
— the gold, in short, that Phideas stole
You can’t steal credit : the Parthenon.
— let’s skip any reference, at this time, to the Elgin marbles.
Reuther — shot through a window, at whose pay?
— then there’s Ben Shahn .
Here follows a list of the mayors of
120 American cities in the years following
the Civil War. . or the War Between
the States, if you prefer . like
cubes of fat in the
blutwurst
of the
times .
Credit. Credit. Credit. Give them all credit. They were the fathers of many a later novelist, no worse than the rest.
Money : Joke
could be wiped out
at stroke
of pen
and was when
gold and pound were
devalued
Money : small time
reciprocal action relic
precedent to stream-lined
turbine : credit
Uranium : basic thought—leadward
Fractured : radium : credit
Curie : woman (of no importance) genius : radium
THE GIST
credit : the gist
IN
venshun.
O.KAY
In venshun
and seeinz az how yu hv/started. Will you consider
a remedy of a lot :
i.e. LOCAL control of local purchasing
power .
? ?
Difference between squalor of spreading slums
and splendour of renaissance cities.
Credit makes solid
is related directly to the effort,
work: value created and received,
“the radiant gist” against all that
scants our lives.
Haven’t you forgot your virgin purpose,
the language?
What language? “The past is for those who
lived in the past,” is all she told me.
Shh! the old man’s asleep
—all but for the tides, there is no river,
silent now, twists and turns
in his dreams .
The ocean yawns!
It is almost the hour
—and did you ever know of a sixty year
woman with child . ?
Listen!
someone’s coming up the path, . perhaps
it is not too late? Too late .
J
ONATAN,
bap. Oct. 29, 1752; m. Gritie (Haring?). He was born and brought up at Hoppertown (Hohokus), but in 1779 was running the grist and saw-mill at Wagaraw, now owned by the Alyeas. On the night of April 21, 1779, his wife was aroused by a noise as of someone trying to get into the lower part of the mill, where, for better security, he kept his horses. “Yawntan,” said she in Dutch, “someone is stealing your horses.” Lighting a lantern, he threw open the upper half-door and challenged the marauders. Instantly a shot was fired through the lower half-door, wounding him in the abdomen. He staggered back into the house and fell upon a bed, covering himself up in the blankets. A party of Tories, masked and disguised, rushed in, and, compelling his young wife to hold a candle, they savagely attacked the prostrate form. Once he seized one of the bayonettes and holding it for a moment, cried at his assailant: “Andries, this is an old grudge.” With redoubled fury the inhuman savages bayonetted
him
, until with a groan he expired. His two infant children who were wont to sleep in a trundle bed beneath his, were horrified spectators of their father’s massacre. After the murderers were gone, his wife and a neighbor took the blood out of the bed in double handfuls. The murdered man had received nineteen or twenty cruel bayonette thrusts. It was believed that some neighbor had led the Tories to the attack, less from political or pecuniary considerations than from motives of private revenge. Hopper was a captain in the Bergen County militia. One of his children was Albert, bap. Oct. 6, 1776. It is said that Jonathan’s children removed to Cincinnati, and there attained some prominence.
Come on, get going. The tide’s in
Leise, leise! Lentement! Che va piano
,
va lontano!
Virtue,
my kitten, is a complex reward in all
languages, achieved slowly.
. which reminds me
of an old friend, now gone .
—while he was still
in the hotel business, a tall and rather beautiful young woman came to his desk one day to ask if there were any interesting books to be had on the premises. He, being interested in literature, as she knew, replied that his own apartment was full of them and that, though he couldn’t leave at the moment—Here’s my key, go up and help yourself.
She thanked him and
went off. He forgot all about her.
After lunch he too
went to his rooms not remembering until he was at the door that he had no key. But the door was unlatched and as he entered, a girl was lying naked on the bed. It startled him a little. So much so that all he could do was to remove his own clothes and lie beside her. Quite comfortable, he soon fell into a heavy sleep. She also must have slept.
They wakened later,
simultaneously, much refreshed.
—another, once gave me
an old ash-tray, a bit of
porcelain inscribed
with the legend,
La Vertue
est toute dans l’effort
baked into the material,
maroon on white, a glazed
Venerian scallop . for
ashes, fit repository
for legend, a quieting thought:
Virtue is wholly
in the effort to be virtuous .
This takes connivance,
takes convoluted forms, takes
time! A sea-shell .
Let’s not dwell on childhood’s
lecherous cousins. Why
should we? Or even on
as comparatively simple
a thing as the composite
dandelion that
changes its face overnight . Virtue,
a mask: the mask,
virtuous .
Kill the explicit sentence, don’t you think? and expand our meaning—by verbal sequences. Sentences, but not grammatical sentences: dead-falls set by schoolmen. Do you think there is any virtue in that? better than sleep? to revive us?
She used to call me her
country bumpkin
Now she is gone I think
of her as in Heaven
She made me believe in
it . a little
Where else could she go?
There was
Something grandiose
about her .
Man and woman are not
much emphasized as
such at that age: both