A Note to Readers:
You learn to ignore authorial intent when you become an English major. Most of us really grasp it with Emily Dickinson. As it turns out, it's not interesting for very long to read her poems through the "crazy-recluse-in-only-white-clothes" lens. I thought, however, that this deserved an explanation.
In this latest incarnation of the Paterson Project, Kenny and I have been doing very little revising and drafting. I did a little more on this one, but not a lot. One of my favorite things that happens when writing happened to me here: I learned what I really wanted to say while moving through the writing process. It started as a poem about about the love of a poem, but as you will see, it turns into a poem about friendship and the love of a friend. A different approach to this poem would have revised away the transition and the change from one to the other, but I decided to leave it since it shows the growth of the poem and, in a way, the growth of our friendship.
Far be it from me to tell someone how to read a poem, but that's what this one is about. Take it or leave it, I suppose. To paraphrase Eliot, these are private words addressed in public.
"How Do I Love You? These!"/Preceding Whispered Voices
The falls contain it:
Heraclitean fire
gone cold.
Icy mists collect, sedimentarily.
Dirt and grime
swallowed in the whiteness
covered again
by dirt and grime.
Look east, to the rolling.
The sounds of the wind are not of the wind at all.
Standing in Paterson's ear the sound of the wind is
the sound of a mouth blowing over a bottle, of lips
over an embouchure hole, ear and skull as instrument,
moving, swaying, fighting against the musician,
shifting pitch with an internal manipulation.
The sound flows over the crevice of the riverbed, through the bridge
and the swirls of water and eddying pools add to it.
Where the poem becomes the poem, where it always started.
Ah, love, let us be true.
To lean over the steel of the bridge and peer into the heart
is to see into the beginning and the end and to begin again.
From beyond the edge
the sounds are those of a broken city
rent asunder
by time and misplaced hopes.
But here, here is where it all begins! Look here, Paterson! Look here, Angels!
The first time we stood here we were but boys, alive
with the expectation of the falls, with the turbulence of the Passaic.
We broke into Hinchcliffe, and later learned we had stood
on sacred ground: Gibson, Paige, Cool Papa
and more played there. Our memories, gleaming of half-extinguished
thought, change and begin again and we hear the sound of
Gibson's bat. We scuttled beneath rusty fences into ruins
of industries long dead and in them we found beauty, stole bricks, then home.
The world hangs over Paterson. The steel of its bridge,
the brick of its power plant, the Passaic.
The second time we stood there we came in from East Rutherford,
Flossie and Bill's graves.
The unremembered remained, the falls remain, a source
of what will be. But we also saw Paterson, and in short, we were afraid.
The city, ravaged and decaying, beauty in the grit but not in the suffering.
Our lives new again, he with a child now, our exploration this time,
was different, sadder.
Paterson falls, the Great Falls, the fallen.
To be reborn anew?
For the falls, always. For Paterson, only hope remains.
A couple of months after my wife and I had placed
my daughters' two little brass urns deep into the soil,
into one grave (they had only ever known each other), it was
him I stood with to see the marker for the first time.
A brass name plate on cold marble, it is what I touch now
when I want to feel close to them. Then, I stood,
shaking, despairing, weeping, his heavy arm looped
around my shoulder, his other hand grasped the bridge
of his nose, lifting his glasses away from the tears
as they streaked his pale skin. In that moment
he held me together, as only hope remained.
We had had Paterson, thankfully, because now
I needed more.
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