Paterson (Revised Edition) (9 page)

by a lover who

appraises every feature of his bride’s

comeliness, and terror—

terror to him such as one, a man

married, feels toward his bride—

You are the eternal bride and

father—quid pro quo,

a simple miracle that knows

the branching sea, to which the oak

is coral, the coral oak.

The Himalayas and prairies

of your features amaze and delight—

Why should I move from this place

where I was born? knowing

how futile would be the search

for you in the multiplicity

of your debacle. The world spreads

for me like a flower opening—and

will close for me as might a rose—

wither and fall to the ground

and rot and be drawn up

into a flower again. But you

never wither—but blossom

all about me. In that I forget

myself perpetually—in your

composition and decomposition

I find my     .     .

despair!

.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .

Whatever your reasons were for that note of yours and for your indifferent evasion of my letters just previous to that note—the one thing that I still wish more than any other is that I could see you.     It’s tied up with even more than I’ve said here.     And more importantly, it is the
one
impulse I have that breaks through that film, that crust, which has gathered there so fatally between my true self and that which can make only mechanical gestures of living.     But even if you should grant it, I wouldn’t want to see you unless with some little warmth of friendliness and friendship on your part….     Nor should I want to see you at your office under any circumstances.     That is not what I mean (because I have no specific matter to see you about now as I had when I first called upon you as a complete stranger, nor as I could have had, just before your last note when I wanted so badly to have you go over some of my most faulty poems with me), I have been feeling (with that feeling increasingly stronger) that I shall never again be able to recapture any sense of my own personal identity (without which I cannot write, of course—but in itself far more important than the writing) until I can recapture some faith in the reality of my own thoughts and ideas and problems which were turned into dry sand by your attitude toward those letters and by that note of yours later.     That is why I cannot throw off my desire to see you—not impersonally, but in the most personal ways, since I could never have written you at all in a completely impersonal fashion.

Look for the nul

defeats it all

the N of all

equations     .

that rock, the blank

that holds them up

which pulled away—

the rock’s

their fall. Look

for that nul

that’s past all

seeing

the death of all

that’s past

all being     .

But Spring shall come and flowers will bloom

and man must chatter of his doom     .     .

The descent beckons

as the ascent beckoned

Memory is a kind

of accomplishment

a sort of renewal

even

an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new

places

inhabited by hordes

heretofore unrealized,

of new kinds—

since their movements

are towards new objectives

(even though formerly they were abandoned)

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since

the world it opens is always a place

formerly

unsuspected. A

world lost,

a world unsuspected

beckons to new places

and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory

of whiteness     .

With evening, love wakens

though its shadows

which are alive by reason

of the sun shining—

grow sleepy now and drop away

from desire     .

Love without shadows stirs now

beginning to waken

as night

advances.

The descent

made up of despairs

and without accomplishment

realizes a new awakening   :

which is a reversal

of despair.

For what we cannot accomplish, what

is denied to love,

what we have lost in the anticipation—

a descent follows,

endless and indestructible     .

Listen!   —

the pouring water!

The dogs and trees

conspire to invent

a world—gone!

Bow, wow! A

departing car scatters gravel as it

picks up speed!

Outworn!
le pauvre petit ministre

did his best, they cry,

but though he sweat for all his worth

no poet has come     .

Bow, wow! Bow, wow!

Variously the dogs barked, the trees

stuck their fingers to their noses. No

poet has come, no poet has come.

—soon no one in the park but

guilty lovers and stray dogs     .

Unleashed!

Alone, watching the May moon above the

trees     .

At nine o’clock the park closes. You

must be out of the lake, dressed, in

your cars and going: they change into

their street clothes in the back seats

and move out among the trees     .

The “great beast” all removed

before the plunging night, the crickets’

black wings and hylas wake     .

Missing was the thing Jim had found in Marx and Veblen and Adam Smith and Darwin—the dignified sound of a great, calm bell tolling the morning of a new age          .          .          instead, the slow complaining of a door loose on its hinges.

Faitoute, conscious by moments,

rouses by moments, rejects him finally

and strolls off     .

That the poem,

the most perfect rock and temple, the highest

falls, in clouds of gauzy spray, should be

so rivaled     .     that the poet,

in disgrace, should borrow from erudition (to

unslave the mind): railing at the vocabulary

(borrowing from those he hates, to his own

disfranchisement)     .

—discounting his failures     .

seeks to induce his bones to rise into a scene,

his dry bones, above the scene, (they will not)

illuminating it within itself, out of itself

to form the colors, in the terms of some

back street, so that the history may escape

the panders

.     .     accomplish the inevitable

poor, the invisible, thrashing, breeding

.     debased city

Love is no comforter, rather a nail in the

skull

.     reversed in the mirror of its

own squalor, debased by the divorce from learning,

its garbage on the curbs, its legislators

under the garbage, uninstructed, incapable of

self instruction     .

a thwarting, an avulsion   :

—flowers uprooted, columbine, yellow and red,

strewn upon the path; dogwoods in full flower,

the trees dismembered; its women

shallow, its men steadfastly refusing—at

the best     .

The language     .     words

without style! whose scholars (there are none)

.     or dangling, about whom

the water weaves its strands encasing them

in a sort of thick lacquer, lodged

under its flow     .

Caught (in mind)

beside the water he looks down, listens!

But discovers, still, no syllable in the confused

uproar: missing the sense (though he tries)

untaught but listening, shakes with the intensity

of his listening     .

Only the thought of the stream comforts him,

its terrifying plunge, inviting marriage—and

a wreath of fur     .

And She     —

Stones invent nothing, only a man invents.

What answer the waterfall? filling

the basin by the snag-toothed stones?

And He       —

Clearly, it is the new, uninterpreted, that

remoulds the old, pouring down     .

And She     —

It has not been enacted in our day!

Le

pauvre petit ministre
, swinging his arms, drowns

under the indifferent fragrance of the bass-wood

trees     .

My feelings about you now are those of anger and indignation; and they enable me to tell you a lot of things straight from the shoulder, without my usual tongue tied round-aboutness.

You might as well take all your own literature and everyone else’s and toss it into one of those big garbage trucks of the Sanitation Department, so long as the people with the top-cream minds and the “finer” sensibilities use those minds and sensibilities not to make themselves more humane human beings than the average person, but merely as means of ducking responsibility toward a better understanding of their fellow men, except theoretically—which doesn’t mean a God damned thing.

.     and there go the Evangels! (their organ

loaded into the rear of a light truck) scooting

down-hill     .     the children

are at least getting a kick out of
this!

His anger mounts.     He is chilled to the bone.

As there appears a dwarf, hideously deformed—

he sees squirming roots trampled

under the foliage of his mind by the holiday

crowds as by the feet of the straining

minister. From his eyes sparrows start and

sing. His ears are toadstools, his fingers have

begun to sprout leaves (his voice is drowned

under the falls)     .

Poet, poet! sing your song, quickly! or

not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out

your kind.

He all but falls     .     .

And She     —

Marry us! Marry us!

Or! be dragged down, dragged

under and lost

She was married with empty words:

better to

stumble at

the edge

to fall

fall

and be

—divorced

from the insistence of place—

from knowledge,

from learning—the terms

foreign, conveying no immediacy, pouring down.

—divorced

from time (no invention more), bald as an

egg     .

and leaped (or fell) without a

language, tongue-tied

the language worn out     .

The dwarf lived there, close to the waterfall—

saved by his protective coloring.

Go home. Write. Compose     .

Ha!

Be reconciled, poet, with your world, it is

the only truth!

Ha!

—the language is worn out.     

And She     —

You have abandoned me!

—at the magic sound of the stream

she threw herself upon the bed—

a pitiful gesture! lost among the words:

Invent (if you can) discover or

nothing is clear—will surmount

the drumming in your head. There will be

nothing clear, nothing clear      .

He fled pursued by the roar.

Seventy-five of the world’s leading scholars, poets and philosophers gathered at Princeton last week     .     .     .

Faitoute ground his heel

hard down on the stone:

Sunny today, with the highest temperature near 80 degrees; moderate southerly winds. Partly cloudy and continued warm tomorrow, with moderate southerly winds.

Her belly     .     her belly is like

a cloud     .     a cloud

at evening     .

His mind would reawaken:

He
Me with my pants, coat and vest still on!

She
And me still in my galoshes!

—the descent follows the ascent—to wisdom

as to despair.

A man is under the crassest necessity

to break down the pinnacles of his moods

fearlessly   —

to the bases; base! to the screaming dregs,

to have known the clean air     .

From that base, unabashed, to regain

the sun kissed summits of love!

—obscurely

in to scribble     .     and a war won!

—saying over to himself a song written

previously     .     inclines to believe

he sees, in the structure, something

of interest:

On this most voluptuous night of the year

the term of the moon is yellow with no light

the air’s soft, the night bird has

only one note, the cherry tree in bloom

makes a blur on the woods, its perfume

no more than half guessed moves in the mind.

No insect is yet awake, leaves are few.

In the arching trees there is no sleep.

The blood is still and indifferent, the face

does not ache nor sweat soil nor the

mouth thirst.     Now love might enjoy its play

and nothing disturb the full octave of its run.

Her belly     .     her belly is like a white cloud     .     a

white cloud at evening     .     before the shuddering night!

My attitude toward woman’s wretched position in society and my ideas about all the changes necessary there, were interesting to you, weren’t they, in so far as they made for
literature?
That my particular emotional orientation, in wrenching myself free from patterned standardized feminine feelings, enabled me to do some passably good work with
poetry
—all that was fine, wasn’t it—something for you to sit up and take notice of! And you saw in one of my first letters to you (the one you had wanted to make use of, then, in the Introduction to your Paterson) an indication that my thoughts were to be taken seriously, because that too could be turned by you into literature, as something disconnected from life.

But when my actual personal life crept in, stamped all over with the
very same
attitudes and sensibilities and preoccupations that you found quite admirable as
literature
—that was an entirely different matter, wasn’t it? No longer admirable, but, on the contrary, deplorable, annoying, stupid, or in some other way unpardonable; because those very ideas and feelings which make one a writer with some kind of new vision, are often the
very same ones
which, in living itself, make one clumsy, awkward, absurd, ungrateful, confidential where most people are reticent, and reticent where one should be confidential, and which cause one, all too often, to step on the toes of other people’s sensitive egos as a result of one’s stumbling earnestness or honesty carried too far. And that they
are
the very same ones—that’s important, something to be remembered at all times, especially by writers like yourself who are so sheltered from life in the raw by the glass-walled conditions of their own safe lives.