William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 219Which is to say, though it be poorly
said, there is a first wife
and a first beauty, complex, ovate—
the woody sepals standing back under
the stress to hold it there, innatea flower within a flower whose history
(within the mind) crouching
among the ferny rocks, laughs at the names
by which they think to trap it. Escapes!
Never by running but by lying still—
(P,p. 22)Beauty locked—or lurking—in the mind? An unlikely place, this—an old
African woman with sagging breasts—to begin the search for beauty. But for the
African chieftain, the beauty of his first wife crouches there among the “ferny
rocks” of hismind, and is obscurely translated through the eight successors.
Paterson will seek—and find—beauty in the most unlikely of places.
In “Sunday in the Park” (Book II), Paterson spots two lovers in a
“grassy den,” the woman “lies sweating” at the side of a dozing man—
She stirs, distraught,
against him—wounded (drunk), moves
against him (a lump) desiring,
against him, boredflagrantly bored and sleeping, a
beer bottle still grasped spear-like
in his hand.
(P,p. 59)Small boys peer down on the frustrated lovers. The woman moves nearer the
man, “her lean belly to the man’s backside,” but he does not waken:
—to which he adds his useless voice:
until there moves in his sleep
a music that is whole, unequivocal (in
his sleep, sweating in his sleep—laboring
against sleep, agasp!)
—and does not waken.