A poem seeks me out

So much depends
upon

A red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

It is rare for me that a poem comes to mind and will not be denied my attention. I must assume there is some meaning in the fact that the poem has sought me out.

This poem is by William Carlos Williams and is one of the most famous of the Imagist poem, the school of poetic thought which holds that the object itself is the subject of poetry and not an allegory or metaphor for another object (or feeling or event) altogether. Which is not to say there is not deep meaning to the poem, but that the objects themselves—wheelbarrow, chickens, rain—carry all the meaning there is to be found there.

There are those who claim to have deciphered the code of this poem, but I think they are suffering from a basic misunderstanding. There is no code. The images are evocative in and of themselves and the fact that the poem evokes so much for so many is the measure of its "success". Here is what it means to me:

The first four words make the whole poem work. We are not merely being given an image to look at (though that can be very effective, as in the best haiku), but told that so much depends on this object, which causes us to look more closely than we might otherwise.

The object in question is a red wheelbarrow. Notice that the word "wheelbarrow" is broken into its two constituent parts, which breaks up our assumptions about the object and causes us to look at it more closely. And a wheelbarrow truly is a rather remarkable thing, an inclined plane with a wheel. The fact of the inclined plane makes it possible for us to lift much heavier loads than we would otherwise be able to (think of a flat cart with the same load and having to lift it over an obstruction, for instance, and how much more possible the lifting is with a wheelbarrow). Then, the presence of an angled front panel combined with the incline plane makes it possible for us to dump those loads rather than have to transport them with a shovel or other tool from the cart to the ground. The fact that we have taken all this for granted does not make it any the less remarkable; Williams is asking us to notice this fact. He may not have had inclined planes and such in mind when he wrote the poem, but he had noticed the enormous utility of the tool and how much depends on it.

But what is such a trusty tool doing abandoned out in the rain rather than safely stored in a shed? It seems a rather sad oversight, but we have all done similar things through our carelessness or distraction, forgotten to put the tool away or to tell someone we love them or to notice our life passing until it is too late and the damage has been done: the wheelbarrow is rusted and worn, the relationship is dead, our lives are over. Not that we are to believe that this wheelbarrow is beyond repair—it is much more resilient than that. Nonetheless, for something upon which so much depends, it is rather cavalier treatment for us to leave it sitting in the rain.

But since we have left it sitting in the rain, let's notice how it looks with the rain streaked on it. It provides the barrow with a glaze that makes it more beautiful than it would have been otherwise. This is not a brand new, shiny wheelbarrow, after all, but a well-used, worn, trusty companion that benefits from the glaze the rain gives it.

Then, as if the beauty of the object were not sufficient unto itself, this shiny, red, beloved tool is set off against the stark whiteness of the chickens, its loveliness thereby accentuated to an even greater degree. This brings it that much more into the foreground of the image and of our thoughts.

This, then, is the gift Williams gave us, but what it means is entirely individual. For me, it brings to mind the idea, first of all, that poems are often quite adept at doing what dharma teachers try so hard to do: it asks me to pay attention and notice that the miraculous is happening in every moment, that objects have meaning to the degree that I pay attention. How many red wheelbarrows have I entirely ignored, or ran to put away before they were ruined, without truly seeing them? How many people have I entirely dismissed as beneath my notice without reflecting that they are or were someone's son or daughter, perhaps beloved, perhaps not, but miraculously borne in someone's womb and birthed from them to be loved, despised, scorned, and esteemed by many people throughout their personal history? How often have I reflected on what is mundane to me but is truly astonishing? (One example: every now and then I just have to stop and marvel at the amazing ingenuity which lead to water, gas, electricity and telephone signals showing up at my house regularly, without my having to do much of anything but pay the bills for them. Truly flabbergasting when I come to think of it). How does food get on my table? Why does anyone ever do something so inherently painful as love another? How can so much information get onto something as small as a microchip? How does that tiny sunflower seed know to grow such a gargantuan, majestic creature? What ever gave this species the idea to build buildings as high as 2700 feet in the air and how in the world is such a thing possible?

For these things are worthy of notice; above all this is what this poem says to me. So much depends on my paying attention to them. The Buddha would not be confused by this. He understood how much depends on giving our whole and undivided attention to everything that comes within our perception; a wheelbarrow, a fear, a meanness, a cockroach, a joy, a puppy, a viper. Nothing, absolutely nothing is more important than this. Why should this be? Because the Buddha taught the end of suffering and understood, perhaps more clearly than anyone before or since, that to project ourselves into a place or time other than this place and time is to create suffering. Period. Such a causal relationship cannot be subverted. Yes, of course we must think of the future in order to plan, must think of the past in order to avoid the errors we may have made there that exacerbate our current suffering, but these are the activities of a moment. Most of the time we spend in these times-that-are-not-this-time is entirely fruitless discursive thought that is our ego's attempt to take control over the uncontrollable. This is suffering. It is not possible to have such control, yet we quite nonetheless often expend all our energy trying to make it happen. How could this be other than suffering?

The past is, plain and simple, past. Lily Tomlin said that "forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past." The future is a complex welter of possibilities, the strings of which are too tangled with chance, the behavior of others, the actions of nations, the movement of planets and who knows what mysteries, that to think we can plan for all of its eventualities is like the mouse trying to run the cheese factory; he may eventually get the output he desires, but it was never his doing.

Look! What do you see?