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.