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Goldenrod (Solidago graminifolia): photo by Adamantios, 2007
The pure products of America
go crazy --
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure --
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum --
which they cannot express --
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she'll be rescued by an
agent --
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs --
some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us --
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
Hotshot Eastbound, Iaeger, West Virginia: photo by O. Winston Link, 2 August 1956 (image by Tillman, 2 March 2011)
William Carlos Williams: To Elsie ("The pure products of America"), from Spring and All (1923)
12 comments:
Tom,
Great photos to go w/ great poem -- "mountain folk from Kentucky" has never been made so 'present' as the (possibly) actual people in Elsie's past . . . .
4.11
pink orange line of cloud above shadowed
ridge, red-tailed hawk calling on branch
in foreground, sound of waves in channel
an absence we call the past,
at most no more than
experience, two-dimensional
limits, which follow
sunlight reflected in windblown channel,
sunlit white cloud to the left of point
Steve,
This fits, almost like a glove:
an absence we call the past,
at most no more than
experience, two-dimensional
limits, which follow
...
Tom,
Yes, I noticed -- the pure chance synchronicity of our parallel universes. . . .
This must be Love.
As lines...oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
Tom:
Came to this immediately after reading Whitman w/lunch and struck immediately by the remarkable similarities and likewise huge differences - there is that American-ness Whitman so boldly captured - men without shirts kicking carburetors, amazing images! - secreted in that secret rhythm of Williams is Whitman ... thinking of what I just read, I am the poet of wickedness as much as I am the poet or goodness -
its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity
The photographs almost painful in their stunning clarity and Williams, never better.
thanks,
Don
wonderful photos!!
This is so powerful I will be with it for a while. It's funny what the mind first fixes on. For me, it's:
the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
rather than, for instance, the Kentucky reference (supported by the images), because the New Jersey identification really captures something true about a place I'm familiar with but never thought about in quite that way.
The pictures are all wonderful but I really love the goldenrod. First, because it's so beautiful and second because it, like the New Jersey reference, reminds me of things from my own experience -- in this case reading the annual New York Times "the goldenrod is in bloom" spring announcement on the editorial page. I don't know whether they run that kind of piece any longer, but I used to enjoy them because you could sort of set your watch by their arrival, like annual cooking section items.
That girl on the car hood is really evocative. Curtis
Wickedness and goodness, goldenrod and men without shirts kicking carburetors, images sinking us into the muddy junkyard roots of
an absence we call the past,
and reminding us that even though our lives are
at most no more than
experience,
still experience is perhaps not so
two-dimensional
after all...
because out there beyond the narrow selfish
limits, which follow
us wherever we go, there is always that something else, the moment expanding into
the (possibly) actual
where the parallel lives (lines) DO somehow amazingly sometimes converge, even meet and greet --
because we are made of blood and dirt and organs, not geometry, after all
wonderful explications
and the pure products
of America are all around
the unexpected
often found
Whitman's I see
Yes, the pure products, they do keep cropping up, somehow, and the most beautiful flowers always seem to be the ones disguised as weeds.
Rank, raw, uncontainable, not be controlled or categorized, the shambling, shiftless, endlessly surprising manifestations of the real.
In which rest, maybe, all the hope that's left.
After lying dormant for several decades, "To Elsie" popped into my head so I of couse googled it and ended up here (again).
One of my all-time favorite poems.
Hey Kevin, ditto here, thanks for reminding me. A beautifully -- and painfully -- true poem. Which gets truer by the minute, now.
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
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