Paterson (Revised Edition) by William Carlos Williams

Author:William Carlos Williams [Williams, William Carlos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811223416
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1995-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Scattered, the fierceness

of knowledge comes flocking down again—

souvenir of childhood,

the skull of the white stone .

There was Margaret of the big breasts

and daring eyes who carried

her head, where her small brain rattled,

as the mind might wish,

at the best, to be carried. There was

Lucille, gold hair and blue eyes, very

straight, who

to the amazement of many, married a

saloon keeper and lost her modesty.

There was loving Alma, who wrote a steady

hand, whose mouth never wished for

relief. And the cold Nancy, with small

firm breasts .

You remember?

. a high

forehead, she who never smiled more

than was sufficient but whose broad

mouth was icy with pleasure startling

the back and knees! whose words were

few and never wasted. There were

others — half hearted, the over-eager,

the dull, pity for all of them, staring

out of dirty windows, hopeless, indifferent,

come too late and a few, too drunk

with it — or anything — to be awake to

receive it. All these

and more — shining, struggling flies

caught in the meshes of Her hair, of whom

there can be no complaint, fast in

the invisible net — from the back country,

half awakened — all desiring. Not one

to escape, not one . a fragrance

of mown hay, facing the rapacious,

the “great” .

The whereabouts of Peter the Dwarf’s grave was unknown until the end of the last century, when, in 1885, P. Doremus, undertaker, was moving bodies from the cellar of the old church to make room for a new furnace, he disinterred a small coffin and beside it a large box. In the coffin was the headless skeleton of what he took to be a child until he opened the large box and found therein an enormous skull. In referring to the burial records it was learned that Peter the Dwarf had been so buried.

Yellow, for genius, the Jap said. Yellow

is your color. The sun. Everybody looked.

And you, purple, he added, wind over water.

My serpent, my river! genius of the fields,

Kra, my adored one, unspoiled by the mind,

observer of pigeons, rememberer of

cataracts, voluptuary of gulls! Knower

of tides, counter of hours, wanings and

waxings, enumerator of snowflakes, starer

through thin ice, whose corpuscles are

minnows, whose drink, sand .

Here’s to the baby,

may it thrive!

Here’s to the labia

that rive

to give it place

in a stubborn world.

And here’s to the peak

from which the seed was hurled!

In a deep-set valley between hills, almost hid

by dense foliage lay the little village.

Dominated by the Falls the surrounding country

was a beautiful wilderness where mountain pink

and wood violet throve: a place inhabited only

by straggling trappers and wandering Indians.

A print in colors by Paul Sandby, a well known

water color artist of the eighteenth century,

a rare print in the Public Library

shows the old Falls restudied from a drawing

made by Lieut. Gov. Pownall (excellent work) as he

saw it in the year 1700.

The wigwam and the tomahawk, the Totowa tribe .

On either side lay the river-farms resting in

the quiet of those colonial days: a hearty old

Dutch stock, with a toughness to stick and

hold fast, although not fast in making improvements.

Clothing homespun. The people raised their own

stock. Rude furniture, sanded floors, rush

bottomed chair, a pewter shelf of Brittania

ware.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.