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 po
unds, 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
they die also
incommunicado.
The language, the language
fails them
They do not know the words
or have not
the courage to use them .
—girls from
families that have decayed and
taken to the hills: no words.
They may look at the torrent in
their minds
and it is foreign to them. .
They turn their backs
and grow faint—but recover!
Life is sweet
they say: the language!
—the language
is divorced from their minds,
the language . . the language!
If there was not beauty, there was a strangeness and a bold association of wild and cultured life grew up together in the Ramapos: two phases.
In the hills, where the brown trout slithered among the shallow stones, Ring-wood—where the old Ryerson farm had been—among its velvet lawns, was ringed with forest trees, the butternut, and the elm, the white oak, the chestnut and the beech, the birches, the tupelo, the sweet-gum, the wild cherry and the hackleberry with its red tumbling fruit.
While in the forest clustered the ironworkers’ cabins, the charcoal burners, the lime kiln workers—hidden from lovely Ringwood—where General Washington, gracing any poem, up from Pompton for rest after the traitors’ hangings could be at ease—and the links were made for the great chain across the Hudson at West Point.
Violence broke out in Tennessee, a massacre by the Indians, hangings and exile—standing there on the scaffold waiting, sixty of them. The Tuscaroras, forced to leave their country, were invited by the Six Nations to join them in Upper New York. The bucks went on ahead but some of the women and the stragglers got no further than the valley-cleft near Suffern. They took to the mountains there where they were joined by Hessian deserters from the British Army, a number of albinos among them, escaped negro slaves and a lot of women and their brats released in New York City after the British had been forced to leave. They had them in a pen there—picked up in Liverpool and elsewhere by a man named Jackson under contract with the British Government to provide women for the soldiers in America.
The mixture ran in the woods and took the general name, Jackson’s Whites. (There had been some blacks also, mixed in, some West Indian negresses, a shipload, to replace the whites lost when their ship, one of six coming from England, had foundered in a storm at sea. He had to make it up somehow and that was the quickest and cheapest way.)
New Barbadoes Neck, the region was called.
Cromwell, in the middle of the seventeenth century, shipped some thousands of Irish women and children to the Barbadoes to be sold as slaves. Forced by their owners to mate with the others these unfortunates were succeeded by a few generations of Irish-speaking negroes and mulattos. And it is commonly asserted to this day the natives of Barbadoes speak with an Irish brogue.
I remember
a Geographic picture, the 9 women
of some African chief semi-naked
astraddle a log, an official log to
be presumed, heads left:
Foremost
froze the young and latest,
erect, a proud queen, conscious of her power,
mud-caked, her monumental hair
slanted above the brows—violently frowning.
Behind her, packed tight up
in a descending scale of freshness
stiffened the others
and then . .
the last, the first wife,
present! supporting all the rest growing
up from her—whose careworn eyes
serious, menacing—but unabashed; breasts
sagging from hard use . .
Whereas the uppointed breasts
of that other, tense, charged with
pressures unrelieved .
and the rekindling they bespoke
was evident.
Not that the lightnings
do not stab at the mystery of a man
from both ends—and the middle, no matter
how much a chief he may be, rather the more
because of it, to destroy him at home .
. . Womanlike, a vague smile,
unattached, floating like a pigeon
after a long flight to his cote.
Mrs. Sarah Cumming, consort of the Rev. Hooper Cumming, of Newark, was a daughter of the late Mr. John Emmons, of Portland, in the district of Maine…. She had been married about two months, and was blessed with a flattering prospect of no common share of Temporal felicity and usefulness in the sphere which Providence had assigned her; but oh, how uncertain is the continuance of every earthly joy.
On Saturday, the 20th of June, 1812, the Rev. Cumming rode with his wife to Paterson, in order to supply, by presbyterial appointment, a destitute congregation in that place, on the following day…. On Monday morning, he went with his beloved companion to show her the falls of the Passaic, and the surrounding beautiful, wild and romantic scenery,—little expecting the solemn event to ensue.
Having ascended the flight of stairs (the Hundred Steps) Mr. and Mrs. Cumming walked over the solid ledge to the vicinity of the cataract, charmed with the wonderful prospect, and making various remarks upon the stupendous works of nature around them. At length they took their station on the brow of the solid rock, which overhangs the basin, six or eight rods from the falling water, where thousands have stood before, and where there is a fine view of the sublime curiosities of the place. When they had enjoyed the luxury of the scene for a considerable length of time, Mr. Cumming said, “My dear, I believe it is time for us to set our face homeward”; and at the same moment, turned round in order to lead the way. He instantly heard the voice of distress, looked back and his wife was gone!
Mr. Cumming’s sensations on the distressing occasion may, in some measure, be conceived, but they cannot be described. He was on the borders of distraction, and, scarcely knowing what he did, would have plunged into the abyss, had it not been kindly ordered in providence that a young man should be near, who instantly flew to him, like a guardian angel, and held him from a step which his reason, at the time, could not have prevented. This young man led him from the precipice, and conducted him to the ground below the stairs. Mr. Cumming forced himself out of the hands of his protector, and ran with violence, in order to leap into the fatal flood. His young friend, however, caught him once more…. Immediate search was made, and diligently continued throughout the day, for the body of Mrs. Cumming; but to no purpose. On the following morning, her mortal part was found in a depth of 42 feet, and, the same day, was conveyed to Newark.
A false language. A true. A false language pouring—a
language (misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted) without
dignity, without minister, crashing upon a s
tone ear. At least
it settled it for her. Patch too, as a matter of fact. He
became a national hero in ’28, ’29 and toured the country
diving from cliffs and masts, rocks and bridges—to prove his
thesis: Some things can be done as well as others.
THE GRRRREAT HISTORY of that
old time Jersey Patriot
N. F. P A T E R S O N !
(N for Noah; F for Faitoute; P for short)
“Jersey Lightning” to the boys.
So far everything had gone smoothly. The pulley and ropes were securely fastened on each side of the chasm, and everything made in readiness to pull the clumsy bridge into position. It was a wooden structure boarded up on both sides, and a roof. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon and a large crowd had gathered—a large crowd for that time, as the town only numbered about four thousand—to watch the bridge placed in position.
That day was a great day for old Paterson. It being Saturday, the mills were shut down, so to give the people a chance to celebrate. Among those who came in for a good part of the celebration was Sam Patch, then a resident in Paterson, who was a boss over cotton spinners in one of the mills. He was my boss, and many a time he gave me a cuff over the ears.
Well, this day the constables were on the look for Patch, because they thought he would be on a spree and cause trouble. Patch had declared so frequently that he would jump from the rocks that he was placed under arrest at various times. He had previously been locked up in the basement under the bank with a bad case of delirium tremens, but on the day the bridge was pulled across the chasm he was let out. Some thought he was crazy. They were not far wrong.
But the happiest man in the town that day was Timothy B. Crane, who had charge of the bridge. Tim Crane was a hotel keeper and kept a tavern on the Manchester side of the Falls. His place was a great resort for circus men. Such famous circus men of the long ago as Dan Rice and James Cooke, the great bareback rider, visited him.
Tim Crane built the bridge because his rival, Fyfield, who kept the tavern on the other side of the falls, was getting the benefit of the “Jacob’s Ladder,” as it was sometimes called—the “hundred steps,” a long, rustic, winding stairs in the gorge leading to the opposite side of the river—it making his place more easy to get to…. Crane was a very robust man over six feet tall. He wore side whiskers. He was well known to the other citizens as a man of much energy and no little ability. In his manner he resembled the large, rugged stature of Sam Patch.
Paterson (Revised Edition) Page 2
