Paterson: Book Four, Chapter III, p. 199

*adult content disclaimer*

Seeds, or Ideas Spilled by the River Into the Sea

You want to talk about seeds? How’s this:

Two nights ago, rain fell in the middle of the Paterson, New Jersey night for just over an hour and a half. After it funneled down defunct gutters and cascaded over the twist-torn corners of tar-flat roofs, it splattered down on brown-grey piles of week-old frozen winter shit and knocked loose bled-grey newspapers, fast-food bags, crushed packs of cigarettes, and a used condom caked in the crease between sidewalk and storefront and carried them in a flash-flood stream to the park adjacent to the S.U.M. building. There, in the dying-dead carcass of Hamilton’s America, three dry-cold weeks of detritus slipped into the crawling current of the long-spoiled Passaic and made their way, soggy and broken, to an estuary on the Hudson and out to the Sea. If you want poetry, look at the condom: coagulated, left-over semen in a flimsy-yellow bit of latex sank in the current and rolled hesitantly across the riverbed, sending over the course of an hour its contents in sporadic pollen-bursts of wasted spunk into the filth of that long-named River in this yet-named night.