WILLIAMS william carlos, Paterson

3 



up! obverse, reverse; 

the drunk the sober; the illustrious 

the gross; one. In ignorance 

a certain knowledge and knowledge, 

undispersed, its own undoing. 

(The multiple seed, 
packed tight with detail, soured, 
is lost in the flux and the mind, 
distracted, floats off in the same 
scum) 

Rolling up, rolling up heavy with 
numbers. 

It is the ignorant sun 
rising in the slot of 
hollow suns risen, so that never in this 
world will a man live well in his body 
save dying — and not know himself 
dying; yet that is 
the design. Renews himself 
thereby, in addition and subtraction, 
walking up and down. 

and the craft, 
subverted by thought, rolling up, let 
him beware lest he turn to no more than 
the writing of stale poems . . . 
Minds like beds always made up, 

(more stony than a shore) 
unwilling or unable. 



Rolling in, top up, 
under, thrust and recoil, a great clatter: 
lifted as air, boated, multicolored, a 
wash of seas — 

from mathematics to particulars- 
divided as the dew, 
floating mists, to be rained down and 
regathered into a river that flows 
and encircles: 

shells and animalcules 
generally and so to man, 



to Paterson. 

30 



of a cat licking its paw, heard the 

faint filing sound it made: of 

earth his ears are full, there is no sound 

: And his thoughts soared 

to the magnificence of imagined delights 

where he would probe 

as into the pupil of an eye 

as through a hoople of fire, and emerge 

sheathed in a robe 

streaming with light. What heroic 

dawn of desire 

is denied to his thoughts? 

They are trees 

from whose leaves streaming with rain 
his mind drinks of desire : 

Who is younger than I? 

The contemptible twig? 
that I was? stale in mind 

whom the dirt 

recently gave up? Weak 

to the wind. 
Gracile? Taking up no place, 
too narrow to be engraved 

with the maps 

of a world it never knew, 

the green and 
dovegrey countries of 
- the mind. 



A mere stick that has 

twenty leaves 
against my convolutions. 

What shall it become, 

Snot nose, that I have 

not been? 
I enclose it and 

persist, go on. 

Let it rot, at my center. 

Whose center? 
I stand and surpass 

youth's leanness. 

My surface is myself. 

Under which 
to witness, youth is 

buried. Roots? 



Everybody has roots. 

We go on living, we permit ourselves 

to continue — but certainly 

not for the university, what they publish 

severally or as a group: clerks 

got out of hand forgetting for the most part 

to whom they are beholden. 

spitted on fixed concepts like 

roasting hogs, sputtering, their drip sizzling 

in the fire 

Something else, something else the same. 

We walk into a dream, from certainty to the unascertained, 
in time to see . from the roseate past • a 
ribbed tail deploying 

Tra la la la la la la la la 
La tra tra tra tra tra tra 

Upon which there intervenes 
a sour stench of embers. So be it. Rain 
falls and surfeits the river's upper reaches, 
gathering slowly. So be it. Draws together, 
runnel by runnel. So be it. A broken oar 
is found by the searching waters. Loosened