Paterson - Aug 3 2020

Paterson

Aug 3 2020

The steep walls of the gorge

reflect the sound of falling water

and the rapids below,

hard black rock

glistening with spray.

An iron-work bridge

spans the falls,

braced at either end

against the sheer granite walls.

Looking up from the bottom

at its graceful arc

it seems to weigh nothing at all,

floating on high

as if some gossamer thread

had spun itself across.

And so precise

in its fine mesh of girders,

their perfect symmetry

against rough irregular rock.

But how deceptive distance can be.

Because up close

you can see great streaks of rust

corroded steel,

giant bolts

that must have seized long ago.

Some abandoned nests

still wedged into crevices

and some with baby birds.

Along with greyish guano everywhere

that seems permanently baked on.

Not to mention vulgar words

some brave and angry soul

once proclaimed to the world

in blood red paint.

As well as declarations of love

by some aspiring Romeo;

and I can only hope

his passion has lasted as long.

So I stay where I am, looking up.

The beauty

of function and form,

the strength

of a simple arc.

Like a found poem

unintentional art.

 

This poem was inspired by a lovely small movie called Paterson. (In homage, I gave the poem that name. Which I know will confuse most readers. Although a discerning one will recognize it as the title and home-town setting of an epic poem by William Carlos Williams.) The image that stuck with me was of a beautiful bridge spanning a deep waterfall gorge. It was a recurrent image in the film – always seen from a distance, looking up -- and it never seemed anything but magical. (The best picture I was able to find on-line does not really do it justice.)

Adam Driver stars as a bus driver in the small industrial (and now, more likely post-industrial!) New Jersey town of Paterson. He lives a modest regimented life, observantly quiet and calm. He goes by the same name as the town, so seems even more subsumed in his surroundings: almost invisible. (In fact, I don't think he even had a first name!) The contrast with his artistic wife is startling: her fondness for the extremes of black and white; her constant and rather fickle creative fervour; her guileless and somewhat girlish enthusiasms; her exotic ethnicity; her desire for recognition, fame, success. He is not so much repressed as living in his head. Even his love poems are studied and detached. But they also reveal a hidden inner passion, a vividly beating heart. He is an unlikely poet, but really quite talented. He has no ambition, no desire to be published or read, and so represents a kind of pure artistic temperament: creativity for its own sake.

His poetry is diurnal and observational, so the idea of “found poetry” is very present in this movie.

Watching it, I felt a powerful impulse to write. The excitement of the blank page, the sense of infinite possibility it presents, was really quite exhilarating. I have to admit, I actually identified very much with Paterson.

And in the end, despite a great disappointment and true body blow of misfortune, he cannot help but open a new notebook and start putting down words. This spoke to me about how thrilling the process of writing is: that for a poet, it is much more about the journey than the destination, the immersion in the creative act over the actual result.  

Not that any of this appears in my poem. I've learned that a narrow focus works much better in this work. The bridge is what caught my eye, and so where I stayed: the parabolic arc; the contrast of a highly engineered form with the rough irregular rock.