Paterson (Revised Edition) Read Online Free Page B

appeared and made a short speech as he was wont to do. A speech! What could he say that he must leap so desperately to complete it? And plunged toward the stream below. But instead of descending with a plummet-like fall his body wavered in the air—Speech had failed him. He was confused. The word had been drained of its meaning. There’s no mistake in Sam Patch. He struck the water on his side and disappeared.
    A great silence followed as the crowd stood spellbound.
    Not until the following spring was the body found frozen in an ice-cake.
    He threw his pet bear once from the cliff overlooking the Niagara rapids and rescued it after, down stream.

 
II.
    There is no direction. Whither? I
    cannot say. I cannot say
    more than how. The how (the howl) only
    is at my disposal (proposal) : watching—
    colder than stone   .
    a bud forever green,
    tight-curled, upon the pavement, perfect
    in juice and substance but divorced, divorced
    from its fellows, fallen low—
    Divorce is
    the sign of knowledge in our time,
    divorce! divorce!
    with the roar of the river
    forever in our ears (arrears)
    inducing sleep and silence, the roar
    of eternal sleep   .   .   challenging
    our waking—
    —unfledged desire, irresponsible, green,
    colder to the hand than stone,
    unready—challenging our waking:
    Two halfgrown girls hailing hallowed Easter,
    (an inversion of all out-of-doors) weaving
    about themselves, from under
    the heavy air, whorls of thick translucencies
    poured down, cleaving them away,
    shut from the light: bare-
    headed, their clear hair dangling—
    Two—
    disparate among the pouring
    waters of their hair in which nothing is
    molten—
    two, bound by an instinct to be the same:
    ribbons, cut from a piece,
    cerise pink, binding their hair: one—
    a willow twig pulled from a low
    leafless bush in full bud in her hand,
    (or eels or a moon!)
    holds it, the gathered spray,
    upright in the air, the pouring air,
    strokes the soft fur—
    Ain’t they beautiful!
    Certainly I am not a robin nor erudite,
    no Erasmus nor bird that returns to the same
    ground year by year. Or if I am   .   .
    the ground has undergone
    a subtle transformation, its identity altered.
    Indians!
    Why even speak of “I,” he dreams, which
    interests me almost not at all?
    The theme
    is as it may prove: asleep, unrecognized—
    all of a piece, alone
    in a wind that does not move the others—
    in that way: a way to spend
    a Sunday afternoon while the green bush shakes.
    .      .   a mass of detail
    to interrelate on a new ground, difficultly;
    an assonance, a homologue
    triple piled
    pulling the disparate together to clarify
    and compress
    The river, curling, full—as a bush shakes
    and a white crane will fly
    and settle later! White, in
    the shallows among the blue-flowered
    pickerel-weed, in summer, summer! if it should
    ever come, in the shallow water!
    On the embankment a short,
    compact cone (juniper)
    that trembles frantically
    in the indifferent gale: male—stands
    rooted there   .
    The thought returns: Why have I not
    but for imagined beauty where there is none
    or none available, long since
    put myself deliberately in the way of death?
    Stale as a whale’s breath: breath!
    Breath!
    Patch leaped but Mrs. Cumming shrieked
    and fell—unseen (though
    she had been standing there beside her husband half
    an hour or more twenty feet from the edge).
    : a body found next spring
    frozen in an ice-cake; or a body
    fished next day from the muddy swirl—
    both silent, uncommunicative
    Only of late, late! begun to know, to
    know clearly (as through clear ice) whence
    I draw my breath or how to employ it
    clearly—if not well:
    Clearly!
    speaks the red-breast his behest. Clearly!
    clearly!
    —and watch, wrapt! one branch
    of the tree at the fall’s edge, one
    mottled branch, withheld,
    among the gyrate branches
    of the waist-thick sycamore,
    sway less, among the rest, separate, slowly
    with giraffish awkwardness, slightly
    on a