from "Son: Book I" (a decom-poem-sition of "Paterson")

Thanks to Peter in his

Virtual World

for this

one

for my son, age 10, and thinking of our long floating appointment to have "The Talk". (P: Had to do Paterson, my Prufrock) (p.s. can't con-figure the spacing in html, so stuck with underlining) "Work is the refuge of sadness." ~LDC, from "Coffee"


SON: BOOK I

.................The province of the world
.................rises. The poem, when it comes down,
.................is dark.
.............................~a poetic deconstruction from a fragment of Paterson, William Carlos Williams


Reface:
rigor, beauty, quest.
"But how will you find beauty?"
When to make a start
out of rolling up the sum?
Defective dog among a lot
of dogs, rabbits, the lame
deceive assuredly—since we
know beyond our own. Yet,
rolling chaos, nine month wonder,
the city can't be otherwise. Rolling
drunk. Sober ignorance. A certain knowledge
and knowledge undoing. (The seed
packed sour, lost, off in the same
scum)

Rolling, rolling, heavy with
the ignorant sun, the slot of never
in this world save dying—dying,
yet that is the addition—walking,
subverted by writing. Stale...
Like beds made up, unable.
...........................Rolling, top
thrust and recoil, a great
wash of seas—
from divided to regathered
into a river:
...................shell
...................man
...................to son.



I.
LINE OF THE GIANT



Lies in the spent waters,
lies in the thunder of dreams!
Asleep, dreams walk the city,
persist. Incognito butterflies
settle on stone; immortal and seldom
the subtleties of his machinations,
the noise of river automatons who
because they know the sill of their
disappointments walk, bodies locked
in desires—Say it, no
things—nothing but the blank trees,
forked preconception, accident—stained
into body.

From higher than the oozy abandoned
beds, dead withered mud thick with dead—
the river comes. The city crashes—the edge
of recoil. And rainbow
language unravels, combed into a rock's
man, a woman like love. Innumerable.
...........................................................But
only one city.

------poems.......return........embarrass-----------
------more woman than poet-----------------------
------...living...----------------------------------------
------an investigation........bolted forever--------
------hope.......public welfare.......do-good like

The waters—the brink, thought—
cut aside but forever strain,
strike marked by a seeming to forget
later replaced—they coalesce now
quiet or at the close conclusion,
and fall, fall, split apart, drunk
with the catastrophe of the unsupported:
a thunder struck all lightness.

Lost; regained in the fury, driving
to rebound, coming—keeping
to the stream of connotative 'equal'—
coeval void.

And there, her head carved by the quiet:
Colored; the secret temperate him,
his Valley of the Rocks, asleep.



c 2005 by Lorna Dee Cervantes

(from a "Deconstruction" Exercise taking the opening pages of Paterson, a book length poem by William Carlos Williams, and selecting words in order of their appearance, making a 'new' poem)