Return, and so forsake the light.”
The darkness that is half disguised
In the Zodiac of my dream
Gazed on me in his bleak eyes,
And I became what now I seem.
Once my crown was silk and black;
I have dreamed, and I awake.
Now that time has wormed my cheek,
Horns and willows me bespeak.
Paterson, December 1949
Long Live the Spiderweb
Seven years’ words wasted
waiting on the spiderweb:
seven years’ thoughts
harkening the host,
seven years’ lost
sentience naming images,
narrowing down the name
to nothing,
seven years’:
fears
in a web of ancient measure;
the words dead
flies, a crop
of ghosts,
seven years’:
the spider is dead.
Paterson, Spring 1950
The Shrouded Stranger
1
The Shroudy Stranger’s reft of realms.
Abhorred he sits upon the city dump.
His broken heart’s a bag of shit.
The vast rainfall, an empty mirror.
2
A Dream
He climbed over the rim
of the huge tower
looking down afraid,
descended the escarpment
over sheaves of rock,
crossed railyard gullies
and vast river-bridges
on the groundward slope
under an iron viaduct,
coming to rivulet
in a still meadow
by a small wood
where he stood trembling
in the naked flowers,
and walked under oak
to the house of folk.
3
I dreamed I was dreaming again
and decided to go down the years
looking for the Shrouded Stranger.
I knew the old bastard
was hanging around somewhere.
I couldn’t find him for a while;
went looking under beds,
pulling mattresses off,
and finally discovered him
hiding under the springs
crouched in the corner:
met him face to face at last.
I didn’t even recognize him.
“I’ll bet you didn’t think
it was me after all,” he said.
4
Fragmenta Monumenti
It was to have a structure, it
was going to tell a story;
it was to be a mass of images
moving on a page, with
a hollow voice at the center;
it was to have told of Time
and Eternity; to have begun
in the rainfall’s hood and moon,
and ended under the street light
of the world’s bare physical
appearance; begun among vultures
in the mountains of Mexico,
traveled through all America
and ended in garbage on River Street;
its first line was to be
“Be with me Shroud, now—”
and the last “—naked
on broken bottles
between the brick walls,”
being THE VISION OF THE SHROUDED STRANGER OF THE NIGHT.
Paterson-New York, 1949-September 1950
An Imaginary Rose in a Book
Oh dry old rose of God,
that with such bleak perfume
changed images to blood
and body to a tomb,
what fragrance you have lost,
and are now withered mere
crimson myth of dust
and recollection sere
of an unfading garden
whereof the myriad life
and all that flock in blossom,
none other met the knife.
Paterson, Early 1950
Crash
There is more to Fury
Than men imagine
Who drive a pallid jury
On a pale engine.
In a spinning plane,
A false machine,
The pilot drops in flame
From the unseen.
Paterson, Early 1950
The Terms in Which I Think of Reality
a.
Reality is a question
of realizing how real
the world is already.
Time is Eternity
ultimate and immovable;
everyone’s an angel.
It’s Heaven’s mystery
of changing perfection:
absolutely Eternity
changes! Cars are always
going down the street,
lamps go off and on.
It’s a great flat plain;
we can see everything
on top of the table.
Clams open on the table,
lambs are eaten by worms
on the plain. The motion
of change is beautiful,
as well as form called
in and out of being.
b.
Next: to distinguish process
in its particularity with
an eye to the initiation
of gratifying new changes
desired in the real world.
Here we’re overwhelmed
with such unpleasant detail
we dream again of Heaven.
For the world is a mountain
of shit: if it’s going to
be moved at all, it’s got
to be taken by handfuls.
c.
Man lives like the unhappy
whore on River Street who
in her Eternity gets only
a couple of bucks and a lot
of snide remarks in return
for seeking physical love
the best way she knows how,
never really heard of a glad
job or joyous marriage or
a difference in the heart:
or thinks it isn’t for her,
which is her worst misery.
Paterson, Spring 1950
The Night-Apple
Last night I dreamed
of one I loved
for seven long years,
but I saw no face,
only the familiar
presence of the body:
sweat skin eyes
feces urine sperm
saliva all one
odor and mortal taste.
Paterson, Spring 1950
Cézanne’s Ports
In the foreground we see time and life
swept in a race
toward the left hand side of the picture
where shore meets shore.
But that meeting place
isn’t represented;
it doesn’t occur on the canvas.
For the other side of the bay
is Heaven and Eternity,
with a bleak white haze over its mountains.
And the immense water of L’Estaque is a go-between
for minute rowboats.
Paterson, Summer 1950
The Blue Angel
Marlene Dietrich is singing a lament
for mechanical love.
She leans against a mortarboard tree
on a plateau by the seashore.
She’s a life-sized toy,
the doll of eternity;
her hair is shaped like an abstract hat
made out of white steel.
Her face is powdered, whitewashed and
immobile like a robot.
Jutting out of her temple, by an eye,
is a little white key.
She gazes through dull blue pupils
set in the white
s of her eyes.
She closes them, and the key
turns by itself.
She opens her eyes, and they’re blank
like a statue’s in a museum.
Her machine begins to move, the key turns
again, her eyes change, she sings
—you’d think I would have thought a plan
to end the inner grind,
but not till I have found a man
to occupy my mind.
Dream, Paterson, Mid-1950
Two Boys Went Into a Dream Diner
and ate so much the bill was five dollars,
but they had no idea
what they were getting themselves into,
so they shoveled
garbage into a truck in the alley
to make up for the food.
After about five minutes, wondering
how long they would have
to work off what it cost, they asked
the diner owner when
He laughed.
Little did they realize—they were
so virginal—
that a grown worker works half a day
for money like that.
Paterson, Mid-1950
A Desolation
Now mind is clear
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.
What have I done but
wander with my eyes
in the trees? So I
will build: wife,
family, and seek
for neighbors.
Or I
perish of lonesomeness
or want of food or
lightning or the bear
(must tame the hart
and wear the bear).
And maybe make an image
of my wandering, a little
image—shrine by the
roadside to signify
to traveler that I live
here in the wilderness
awake and at home.
Paterson, Mid-1950
In Memoriam: William Cannastra, 1922–1950
He cast off all his golden robes
and lay down sleeping in the night,
and in a dream he saw three fates
at a machine in a shroud of light.
He yelled “I wait the end of Time;
be with me, shroud, now, in my wrath!
There is a lantern in my grave,
who hath that lantern all light hath.”
Alas! The prophet of this dream
is sunken in the dumbing clime:
much is finished, much forgotten
in the wrack and wild love of time.
It’s death that makes man’s life a dream
and heaven’s splendor but a wave;
light that falls into the sea
is swallowed in a starving cave.
Skin may be visionary till the crystal
skull is coaled in aged shade,
but underground the lantern dies,
shroud must rot, and memory fade.
Who talks of Death and Angel now,
great angel darkened out of grace?
The shroud enfolds your radiant doom,
the silent Parcae change the race,
while the man of the apocalypse
shall with his wrath lie ever wed
until the sexless womb bear love,
and the grave be weary of the dead,
tragical master broken down
into a self-embodied tomb,
blinded by the sight of death,
and woven in the darkened loom.
Paterson, September 1950
Ode: My 24th Year
Now I have become a man
and know no more than mankind can
and groan with nature’s every groan,
transcending child’s blind skeleton
and all childish divinity,
while loomed in consanguinity
the weaving of the shroud goes on.
No two things alike; and yet
first memory dies, then I forget
one carnal thought that made thought grim:
but that has sunk below time’s rim
and wonder ageing into woe
later dayes more fatal show:
Time gets thicker, light gets dim.
And I a second Time am blind,
all starlight dimmed out of the mind
that was first candle to the morn,
and candelabra turned to thorn.
All is dream till morn has rayed
the Rose of night back into shade,
Messiah firmament reborn.
Now I cannot go be wild
or harken back to shape of child
chrystal born into the aire
circled by the harte and bear
and agelesse in a greene arcade,
for he is down in Granite laid,
or standing on a Granite stair.
No return, where thought’s completed;
let that ghost’s last gaze go cheated:
I may waste my days no more
pining in spirituall warre.
Where am I in wilderness?
What creature bore my bones to this?
Here is no Eden: this is my store.
September 1950–1951
How Come He Got Canned at the Ribbon Factory
Chorus of Working Girls
There was this character come in
to pick up all the broken threads
and tie them back into the loom.
He thought that what he didn’t know
would do as well as well did, tying
threads together with real small knots.
So there he was shivering in his shoes,
showing his wish to be a god of all the knots
we tended after suffering to learn them up.
to tie these knots which it took us all
of six months to perfect. However he showed
no sign of progress learning how after five
weeks of frigid circumstances of his own
making which we made sure he didn’t break
out of by freezing up on him. Obviously
he wasn’t a real man anyway but a goop.
New York, Late 1950
The Archetype Poem
Joe Blow has decided
he will no longer
be a fairy.
He involves himself
in various snatches
and then hits
a nut named Mary.
He gets in bed with her
and performs
as what in his mind
would be his usual
okay job,
which should be solid
as a rock
but isn’t.
What goes wrong here?
he says
to himself. I want
to take her
but she doesn’t want
to take me.
I thought I was
giving her * * *
and she was giving
me a man’s
position in the world.
Now suddenly she lays
down the law.
I’m very tired, she says,
please go.
Is this it? he thinks.
I didn’t want it
to come to that but
I’ve got to get out
of this situation.
So the question
resolves itself: do
you settle for her
or go? I wouldn’t
give you a nickel,
you aren’t much of a doll
anyway. And he
picks up his pride
and puts on his pants
—glad enough
to have pants to wear—
and goes.
Why is it that versions
of this lack
of communication are
universal?
New York, Late 1950
A Typical Affair
Living in an apartment with a gelded cat
I found a maiden—and left her there.
I seek a better bargain; and that aunt,
that aunt of hers was an awful nuisance.
Seriously, between us, I think I did right
in all things by her. And I’ll see her again,
and we’ll become friendly (not lovers) because
I have to work with her in the shoestore.
She knows, too. And it will be interesting
tomorrow to see how she acts. If she’s
friendly (or even loving) I will resist:
albeit so politely she’ll think she has
been complimented. And one night
drunk maybe we’ll have a ball.
Paterson, December 1950
A Poem on America
America is like Russia.
Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.
We have the proletariat too.
Acis and Galatea sit by the lake.
Versilov wore a hair shirt
and dreamed of classical pictures.
The alleys, the dye works,
Mill Street in the smoke,
melancholy of the bars,
the sadness of long highways,
negroes climbing around
the rusted iron by the river,
the bathing pool hidden
behind the silk factory
fed by its drainage pipes;
all the pictures we carry in our mind
images of the thirties,
depression and class consciousness
transfigured above politics
filled with fire
with the appearance of God.
Early 1951
After Dead Souls
Where O America are you
going in your glorious
automobile, careening
down the highway
toward what crash
in the deep canyon
of the Western Rockies,
or racing the sunset
over Golden Gate