Red Wheelbarrow
Essays & Poems by Luiz
Mee
20 pp., 2003
From a historical perspective, I assume
William Carlos Williams’s wheelbarrow event is formed by necessary and
sufficient conditions, such that, say, the red wheelbarrow had been sitting
there before the chickens arrived and the rain came, that day. As for how so
much depends upon the red wheelbarrow, well, that is another matter. Kind of
scary, really, like what if everything depended upon the red wheelbarrow?
Because the red wheelbarrow sat there,
glazed in rain water beside the white chickens, and it sat there while it was
raining, and it sits there now the rain has ceased and the chickens have
emerged from whatever shelter to continue doing what chickens do in both rain
and shine, I can determine a causal line as to why Williams saw the red wheelbarrow beside the chickens in their
various conditions and make inferences as to their relationship.
It is the task of the historian and the
physicist to describe and explain events in time and space, but for the poet,
time-space must be placed in events. Historical method for a poet is an
eloquent term for the self-created specific formulations of self-created
objective facts.
There’s an inside and an outside
to this. The outside looks like a cheap theatrical prop. The inside is
characterized by a “self” interpreting the
“thing-in-itself.” When I get close to the red wheelbarrow, I
understand I am inventing the red wheelbarrow, and that the red wheelbarrow,
also, invents me. This is why so much depends upon the red wheelbarrow.
The red wheelbarrow is the red wheelbarrow. That’s its purpose—to be
the red wheelbarrow. The purity of its state of being, the pending in it. I
recognize in the red wheelbarrow the sanctity of an everyday thing. As Lu
Garcia says, “You can bury it, but it will never rust.”
Reflections
of a red wheelbarrow
So
little is needed
so
much is remanded
so
little reaches the front
so
much is pending.
Everything
seems squeezed
into
a single
point,
no place
for
me.
Maybe
it’s the rain
water.
Maybe
it’s
the American
way.
I
think, maybe it’s a joke,
but
somehow
I
don’t get it.