Growing up in Paterson
One
Car alarm music echoes
off the walls of city hall,
a symphony of Paterson
thick in coke dealers and
homeless, the
grungy institutions
of the street who hide
shyly under newspapers
and cardboard till someone
turns it off.
Two: Carol Street
All shapes are dangerous,
the window squares shattered into four
equal parts, little girls dancing in each,
a mystery chant of play and song,
tugging at him like a cat with string,
leaning closer and closer to the glass,
or the man in the candy shop slipping him
lollipops for free, while eyeing
mother's breasts,
or the glories of
park stone around which he pranced,
stern faced Union Generals
stained with pigeon droppings and rain,
looking over the beer bottles and sleeping
old men on the benches facing Carol Street
mother shouting for him to cease his reckless
careening through the trees and leaves and
empty dreams.
Three:
He leaped from the Great Falls Bridge for Love,
Silk City's ancient mills dark with dusk,
bobbing in the water like a beer can,
another poem for Williams Carlos Williams'
collection, pockets stuffed with vials
of unsold crack, mother's reflection
thick in his eyes, and the parade of men,
each claiming title of father
above, silhouetted cops haloed by clouds
of billowing blue gun smoke, saying
"He must be dead. No one could have
survived that!" And he, crawling out
of the mud three miles downstream,
leaving a trail of wet
back to his mother.
Three
Rich girls wearing tie dyed shirts
come this way, Paterson's City Hall,
a backdrop of bird shit, bullshit and
metal politicians, a last stand alamo
with no Davey Crockett, only faces
breathing heavy from benches under
"People" magazine,
Rich girls giggling, rolling
bus change in the palms of their hands,
waiting for the number three
to pull in and take them
back to the suburbs.
Four: Stop the World
Blacklight mania plagues old city shop
Paterson's hip in sixty eight with own
head place, pipes and filters and scales,
and long haired kids of sixteen looking
for thrills, their mothers' skirts
still crushed on their faces,
crying about war and dying,
thinking like dumb white niggers,
uniform graves and body bags and the
half masted flags flying over city hall,
getting high over the great falls
with their Vietcong flags
and lack of courage.
Five: Hens
Plaster-faced prostitutes cluttered the old laundry like hens,
clucking over egg-colored washers as they eye the street
borrowing dimes and nickels for the public phone
from the grey-headed old man that tends the machines,
his wrinkled face long passed the issue of desire,
nodding at the fancy cars and white-faced figures from Garfield
who pull up to the curb and beep their horns with engines running,
looking this way and that like fugitives,
as if their wives would suddenly appear,
as if their wives did not own washer and dryer or telephone,
needing no thin dimes to make their connections.
Six
Cheap street vendors sell fruit and flowers,
rooster roosting on their eggs like a savage guard dog,
clucking up and down with crooked claws,
jowels wagging, gaze studying impatient city workers as they travel home:
Mercedes and Lincolns locked in long line behind the traffic light,
leaning on their horns,
mocking the rooster with their grim faces and rude stares,
buying nothing from nobody,
afraid to even crack a window despite the heat.
Seven
They picked us up
for pitching pennies
at city hall
sparkling copper
coins caught
in the bright
city lights
like fire flies, they flew
bounding off the creviced face
of old Alexander Hamilton
and the pigeon-stained
statues of static mayors
whose frowns found
no sympathy
in cold
concrete
ringing coins
in their metal ears
judas music,
to which the police
responded
hauling us
to jail.
Eight
Lady in Purple hat
has her rap down,
laying out family portrait
on people as they pass
"My child"s child,"
she tells a women who
waiting for the bus
"Needs money for her
baby, whose father
was last seen
pimping virgins
on Market street."
She waves prescription
forms and bills
from charity hospital"s
emergency room,
public service gas and electric,
who"ve threatened to turn
off service
for Christmas
a documented life
of horror with
serrated edges
and sense that it
is all somehow
connected.
Nine
Main street in Summer, a cruel mistake
stores filled with last minute shoppers,
buses coming and going in indignant air
and you, waiting for New York,
afraid.
To go or stay, the Hudson dividing
the world in two, no mere New Yorker
vision, but a distant island
which even Columbus could not find.
The flat earth leading us to the brink,
weekly visits climbing down one side
of the Palisade cliffs
and up the other,
fingers bleeding from the cracks.
And you go,
boarding the bus with the sunshine
caught on the edge of your bag,
dragging it away with you,
leaving hazy grey skylessness
behind.
And as I return,
crossing through the fumes
I think of you, your careful fingers
clutching each crack
as you climb.
Ten
I fell for his trick once,
when he came panting panic
saying his tire had "Got tore up"
on a pot-hole in Paterson,
and how he only needed
fifteen more bucks to get his
butt out of town, and me, with a
large heart and just cashed
paycheck, laid seven hard-earned
saw-bucks into his upturned palm,
wearing my guilt for owning a car
with four whole tires
until two days later
when he found me on Main Street
ribbing me with the same old line,
and him with a bundle in his
pocket so big
he could have
bought a car.
Eleven
We sang the "Chock-full-of-nuts" song
at 3 a.m. outside her window, three
very drunk stooges trying to say what
we had never said to her face, sang
and ran, our footsteps echoed by the
old woman's shout that she was calling
the police, though in the morning
there was coffee, cross-buns and aspirin
at each of our doors, and a note saying:
"I love you, too, you crazy men!"