THE POEM BOOK

J P CLARK, WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, & EZRA POUND
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three poems about cities.

JOHN PEPPER CLARK BEKEDEREMO 
Ibadan

Ibadan,
running splash of rust
and gold – flung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun.

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TPB's note:  published in 1962, along with 'Night Rain'(?); found online. 

_____________________

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
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.

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TPB's note:n/a

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EZRA POUND
The Garden

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

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TPB's note: a poem about a city or of a woman of a certain city - or
a certain city and this particular woman in it?