Paterson (Revised Edition)

by William Carlos Williams

is not a vague province. There is a poetry

  of the movements of cost, known or unknown .

  The cost. The cost

  and dazzled half sleepy eyes

  Beautiful thing

  of some trusting animal

  makes a temple

  of its place of savage slaughter

  . . . . . .

  Try another book. Break through

  the dry air of the place

  An insane god

  —nights in a brothel .

  And if I had .

  What then?

  —made brothels my home?

  (Toulouse Lautrec

  again. . )

  Say I am the locus

  where two women meet

  One from the backwoods

  a touch of the savage

  and of T.B.

  (a scar on the thigh)

  The other — wanting,

  from an old culture .

  —and offer the same dish

  different ways

  Let the colors run .

  Toulouse Lautrec witnessed

  it: limbs relaxed

  —all religions

  have excluded it—

  at ease, the tendons

  untensed .

  And so he recorded them

  —a stone

  thrust flint-blue

  up through the sandstone

  of which, broken,

  but unbreakable

  we build our roads .

  —we stammer and elect .

  Quit it. Quit this place. Go where all

  mouths are rinsed: to the river for

  an answer

  for relief from “meaning”

  A tornado approaches (We don’t have

  tornados in these latitudes. What, at

  Cherry Hill?)

  It pours

  over the roofs of Paterson, ripping,

  twisting, tortuous :

  a wooden shingle driven half its length

  into an oak

  (the wind must have steeled

  it, held it hard on both sides)

  The church

  moved 8 inches through an arc, on its

  foundations —

  Hum, hum!

  —the wind

  where it poured its heavy plaits (the face

  unshowing) from the rock’s edge —

  where in the updraft,

  summer days, the red-shouldered hawks ride

  and play

  (in the up-draft)

  and the poor cotton-

  spinner, over the roofs, preparing to dive

  . looks down

  Searching among books; the mind elsewhere

  looking down .

  Seeking.

  II.

  Fire burns; that is the first law.

  When a wind fans it the flames

  are carried abroad. Talk

  fans the flames. They have

  manoeuvred it so that to write

  is a fire and not only of the blood.

  The writing is nothing, the being

  in a position to write (that’s

  where they get you) is nine tenths

  of the difficulty: seduction

  or strong arm stuff. The writing

  should be a relief,

  relief from the conditions

  which as we advance become — a fire,

  a destroying fire. For the writing

  is also an attack and means must be

  found to scotch it — at the root

  if possible. So that

  to write, nine tenths of the problem

  is to live. They see

  to it, not by intellection but

  by sub-intellection (to want to be

  blind as a pretext for

  saying, We’re so proud of you!

  A wonderful gift! How do

  you find the time for it in

  your busy life? It must be a great

  thing to have such a pastime.

  But you were always a strange

  boy. How’s your mother?)

  —the cyclonic fury, the fire,

  the leaden flood and finally

  the cost—

  Your father was such a nice man.

  I remember him well .

  Or, Geeze, Doc, I guess it’s all right

  but what the hell does it mean?

  With due ceremony a hut would be constructed consisting of twelve poles, each of a different species of wood. These they run into the ground, tie them together at the top, cover them entirely with bark, skins or blankets joined close together.

  . Now here is where one sits who will address the Spirit of Fire, He-Who-Lies-With-His-Eyes-Bulging-In-The-Smoke-Hole . Twelve manittos attend him as subordinate deities, half representing animals and the others vegetables. A large oven is built in the house of sacrifice . heated with twelve large red-hot stones.

  Meanwhile an old man throws twelve pipefuls of tobacco upon the hot stones, and directly another follows and pours water on them, which occasions a smoke or vapor almost powerful enough to suffocate the persons in the tent —

  Ex qua re, quia sicubi fumus adscendit in altum; ita sacrificulus, duplicata altiori voce, Kännakä, kännakä! vel aliquando Hoo Hoo! faciem versus orientem convertit.

  Whereupon as the smoke ascends on high, the sacrificer crying with a loud voice, Kännakä, Kännakä! or sometimes Hoo, Hoo! turns his face towards the east.

  While some are silent during the sacrifice, certain make a ridiculous speech, while others imitate the cock, the squirrel and other animals, and make all kinds of noises. During the shouting two roast deer are distributed.

  (breathing the books in)

  the acrid fumes,

  for what they could decipher .

  warping the sense to detect the norm, to break

  through the skull of custom

  to a place hidden from

  affection, women and offspring — an affection

  for the burning .

  It started in the car barns of the street railway company, in the paint shop. The men had been working all day refinishing old cars with the doors and windows kept closed because of the weather which was very cold. There was paint and especially varnish being used freely on all sides. Heaps of paint soaked rags had been thrown into the corners. One of the cars took fire in the night.

  Breathless and in haste

  the various night (of books) awakes! awakes

  and begins (a second time) its song, pending the

  obloquy of dawn .

  It will not last forever

  against the long sea, the long, long

  sea, swept by winds, the “wine-dark sea” .

  A cyclotron, a sifting .

  And there,

  in the tobacco hush: in a tepee they lie

  huddled (a huddle of books)

  antagonistic,

  and dream of

  gentleness—under the malignity of the hush

  they cannot penetrate and cannot waken, to be again

  active but remain—books

  that is, men in hell,

  their reign over the living ended

  Clearly, they say. Oh clearly! Clearly?

  What more clear than that of all things

  nothing is so unclear, between man and

  his writing, as to which is the man and

  which the thing and of them both which

  is the more to be valued

  When discovered it was a small blaze, though it was hot but it looked as tho’ the firemen could handle it. But at dawn a wind came up and the flames (which they thought were subsiding) got suddenly out of control—sweeping the block and heading toward the business district. Before noon the whole city was doomed —

  Beautiful thing

  —the whole city doomed! And

  the flames towering .

  like a mouse, like

  a red slipper, like

  a star, a geranium
/>   a cat’s tongue or —

  thought, thought

  that is a leaf, a

  pebble, an old man

  out of a story by

  Pushkin .

  Ah!

  rotten beams tum-

  bling,

  . an old bottle

  mauled

  The night was made day by the flames, flames

  on which he fed—grubbing the page

  (the burning page)

  like a worm—for enlightenment

  Of which we drink and are drunk and in the end

  are destroyed (as we feed). But the flames

  are flames with a requirement, a belly of their

  own that destroys—as there are fires that

  smolder

  smolder a lifetime and never burst

  into flame

  Papers

  (consumed) scattered to the winds. Black.

  The ink burned white, metal white. So be it.

  Come overall beauty. Come soon. So be it.

  A dust between the fingers. So be it.

  Come tatterdemalion futility. Win through.

  So be it. So be it.

  An iron dog, eyes

  aflame in a flame-filled corridor. A drunkenness

  of flames. So be it. A bottle, mauled

  by the flames, belly-bent with laughter:

  yellow, green. So be it—of drunkenness

  survived, in guffaws of flame. All fire afire!

  So be it. Swallowing the fire. So be

  it. Torqued to laughter by the fire,

  the very fire. So be it. Chortling at flames

  sucked in, a multiformity of laughter, a

  flaming gravity surpassing the sobriety of

  flames, a chastity of annihilation. Recreant,

  calling it good. Calling the fire good.

  So be it. The beauty of fire-blasted sand

  that was glass, that was a bottle: unbottled.

  Unabashed. So be it.

  An old bottle, mauled by the fire

  gets a new glaze, the glass warped

  to a new distinction, reclaiming the

  undefined. A hot stone, reached

  by the tide, crackled over by fine

  lines, the glaze unspoiled .

  Annihilation ameliorated: Hottest

  lips lifted till no shape but a vast

  molt of the news flows. Drink

  of the news, fluid to the breath.

  Shouts its laughter, crying out—by

  an investment of grace in the sand

  —or stone: oasis water. The glass

  splotched with concentric rainbows

  of cold fire that the fire has bequeathed

  there as it cools, its flame

  defied—the flame that wrapped the glass

  deflowered, reflowered there by

  the flame: a second flame, surpassing

  heat .

  Hell’s fire. Fire. Sit your horny ass

  down. What’s your game? Beat you

  at your own game, Fire. Outlast you:

  Poet Beats Fire at Its Own Game! The bottle!

  the bottle! the bottle! the bottle! I

  give you the bottle! What’s burning

  now, Fire?

  The Library?

  Whirling flames, leaping

  from house to house, building to building

  carried by the wind

  the Library is in their path

  Beautiful thing! aflame .

  a defiance of authority

  —burnt Sappho’s poems, burned

  by intention (or are they still hid

  in the Vatican crypts?) :

  beauty is

  a defiance of authority :

  for they were

  unwrapped, fragment by fragment, from

  outer mummy cases of papier mâché, inside

  Egyptian sarcophagi .

  flying papers

  from old conflagrations, picked up

  haphazard by the undertakers to make

  moulds, layer after layer

  for the dead

  Beautiful thing

  The anthology suppressed, revived even by

  the dead, you who understand nothing

  of this:

  Dürer’s Melancholy, the gears

  lying disrelated to the mathematics of the

  machine

  Useless.

  Beautiful thing, your

  vulgarity of beauty surpasses all their

  perfections!

  Vulgarity surpasses all perfections

  —it leaps from a varnish pot and we see

  it pass — in flames!

  Beautiful thing

  —intertwined with the fire. An identity

  surmounting the world, its core — from which

  we shrink squirting little hoses of

  objection — and

  I along with the rest, squirting

  at the fire

  Poet.

  Are you there?

  How shall I find examples? Some boy

  who drove a bull-dozer through

  the barrage at Iwo Jima and turned it

  and drove back making a path for the others —

  Voiceless, his

  action gracing a flame

  —but lost, lost

  because there is no way to link

  the syllables anew to imprison him

  No twist of the flame

  in his own image : he goes nameless

  until a Niké shall live in his honor—

  And for that, invention is lacking,

  the words are lacking:

  the waterfall of the

  flames, a cataract reversed, shooting

  upward (what difference does it make?)

  The language,

  Beautiful thing—that I

  make a fool of myself, mourning the lack

  of dedication

  mourning its losses,

  for you

  Scarred, fire swept

  (by a nameless fire, that is unknown even

  to yourself) nameless,

  drunk.

  Rising, with a whirling motion, the person

  passed into the flame, becomes the flame—

  the flame taking over the person

  —with a roar, an outcry

  which none can afford (we die in silence, we

  enjoy shamefacedly—in silence, hiding

  our joy even from each other

  keeping

  a secret joy in the flame which we dare

  not acknowledge)

  a shriek of fire with

  the upwind, whirling the room away—to reveal

  the awesome sight of a tin roof (1880)

  entire, half a block long, lifted like a

  skirt, held by the fire—to rise at last,

  almost with a sigh, rise and float, float

  upon the flames as upon a sweet breeze,

  and majestically drift off, riding the air,

  sliding

  upon the air, easily and away over

  the frizzled elms that seem to bend under

  it, clearing the railroad tracks to fall

  upon the roofs beyond, red hot

  darkening the rooms

  (but not our minds)

  While we stand with our mouths open,

  shaking our heads and saying, My God, did

  you ever see anything like that? As though

  it were wholly out of our dreams, as

  indeed it is, unparalleled in our most sanguine

  dreams .

  The person submerged

  in wonder, the fire become the person .

  But the pathetic library (that contained,

  perhaps, not one volume of distinction)

  must go down also —

  BECAUSE IT IS SILENT. IT

  IS SILENT BY DEFECT OF VIRTUE IN THAT IT

  CONTAINS NOTHING OF YOU

  That which s
hould be

  rare, is trash; because it contains

  nothing of you. They spit on you,

  literally, but without you, nothing. The

  library is muffled and dead

  But you are the dream

  of dead men

  Beautiful Thing!

  Let them explain you and you will be

  the heart of the explanation. Nameless,

  you will appear

  Beautiful Thing

  the flame’s lover —

  The pitiful dead

  cry back to us from the fire, cold in

  the fire, crying out—wanting to be chaffed

  and cherished

  those who have written books

  We read: not the flames

  but the ruin left

  by the conflagration

  Not the enormous burning

  but the dead (the books

  remaining). Let us read .

  and digest: the surface

  glistens, only the surface.

  Dig in—and you have

  a nothing, surrounded by

  a surface, an inverted

  bell resounding, a

  white-hot man become

  a book, the emptiness of

  a cavern resounding

  Hi Kid

  I know you just about to shot me. But honest Hon. I have really been to busy to write. Here there, and everywhere.

  Bab I haven’t wrote since October so I will go back to Oct. 31, (Oh by the way are friend Madam B. Harris had a party the 31, but only high browns and yellow so I wasn’t invited)

  But I pay that no mind, cause I really (pitched myself a ball) Went to the show early in the day, and then to the dance at the club, had me a (some kinded fine time) I was a feeling good believe me you. child.

  But, child, Nov 1, I did crack you know yourself I been going full force on the (jug) will we went out (going to Newark) was raining, car slaped on brakes, car turned around a few times, rocked a bit and stopped facing the other way, from which we was going. Pal, believe me for the next few days. Honey, I couldn’t even pick up a half filled bucket of hot water for fear of scalding myself.

  Now I don’t know which did it the jug or the car skidding but all I know is I was nowhere on nerves. But as they say alls well that ends well So Nov 15, I mean Kid I was so teaed that I didn’t know a from z I really mean I was teaed Since Nov 15 I Have been at it again ever since.

  But now for the (Boys) How Raymond James People going with Sis but is in jail for giving Joseble Miller a baby.

  Robert Blocker has taken his ring from Sally Mitchell

  Little Sonny Jones is supposed to be the father of a girl’s baby on Liberty St.

  Sally Mund Barbara H Jean C and Mary M are all supposed to be going to have kids Nelson W. a boy on 3rd St is father to 3 kids on their way.

  . . . . . . . . .

  P. S. Kid do you think in your next letter of your you could tell me how to get over there.

  Tell Raymond I said I bubetut hatche isus cashutute Just a new way of talking kid. It is called (Tut) maybe you heard of it. Well here hoping you can read it