from Book I, Paterson

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls

its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He

lies on his right side, head near the thunder

of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,

his dreams walk about the city where he persists

incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.

Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom

seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations

drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river

animate a thousand automations. Who because they

neither know their sources nor the sills of their

disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly

      for the most part,

locked and forgot in their desires-unroused.

  —Say it, no ideas but in things—

  nothing but the blank faces of the houses

  and cylindrical trees

  bent, forked by preconception and accident—

  split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—

  secret—into the body of the light!

From above, higher than the spires, higher

even than the office towers, from oozy fields

abandoned to gray beds of dead grass,

black sumac, withered weed-stalks,

mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves-

the river comes pouring in above the city

and crashes from the edge of the gorge

in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists-

  (What common language to unravel?

  . . .combed into straight lines

  from that rafter of a rock's

  lip.)

A man like a city and a woman like a flower

—who are in love. Two women. Three women.

Innumerable women, each like a flower.

                        But

only one man—like a city.