Paterson (Revised Edition) (5 page)

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 had 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   .   .

And 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.”