Poetry Like a Delicious Cold Plum

William Carlos Williams' poem designated XXII in Spring and All used to drive me crazy. I'd rack my brain trying to figure out what it all meant. The poem is short enough I can reproduce it right here:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Williams, a doctor by trade, published his first book of poetry in 1909, titled simply Poems. The Red Wheelbarrow, as the poem is commonly referred to today, was published in 1923, and you can see Williams' medical career slip out in other poems, such as By the road to the contagious hospital, which was also originally published without a title. The Wheelbarrow is pure imagism. Reading Wheelbarrow is like looking at a photograph; there is no meaning except what you provide. A lot of Williams' poetry was inspired by photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Even if you don't recognize the name, you know who he is. He took this photo:

I'm not sure what this photograph, The Hand of Man, means. The title maybe gives some hints. The harmful effects of pollution and industrialization to the more natural landscape that should be present in the photo, but is the natural beauty really missing because of the locomotive? Personally, I just like trains, so maybe the photo has more of a romantic noir detective feel, like Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine and Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa Lund:

"Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor. If that plane train leaves and you're not with him, if you don't go, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon, and for the rest of you life."
"What about us?'
"We'll always have Paris."

Reading Casablanca into the photograph is probably adding too much meaning. Why can't it just be a train? Why can't Williams' wheelbarrow just be a wheelbarrow?

What catches people off guard is the line "so much depends upon." You have no idea what depends on the wheelbarrow. Williams was asked once what the poem meant. His response is just as enigmatic as the poem:

"[The Wheelbarrow] sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall. He had been a fisherman, caught porgies off Gloucester. He used to tell me how he had to work in the cold in freezing weather, standing ankle deep in cracked ice packing down the fish. He said he didn’t feel cold. He never felt cold in his life until just recently. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by the white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing" (Rizzo).

I don't see Marshall in the poem though. Williams does, but unless you know the history of how the poem was written, Marshall isn't present at all. The only sign of any human activity in the poem is the wheelbarrow, and that mechanical device is somehow taken over by nature altogether—covered in rain and chickens.

***

Williams was overtaken in popularity by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. That poem is complicated, filled with at least seven languages, I don't know how many individual speakers, and obscure pop culture references. Williams wrote in his autobiography, "I felt at once that The Waste Land had set me back twenty years and I'm sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit," and he continued to be critical of Eliot's work. What I like, what I enjoy, about Williams as opposed to Eliot—who I like for different reasons altogether—is Williams use of American plain colloquial English. Nothing about the Wheelbarrow is fancy. Not a single word is over two syllables. American poet and literary critic, John Hollander, called Wheelbarrow "meditative." All good poetry is, really, delicious and cold, like a plum.

Bicycle Locks and Hammers

Bicycle locks are ridiculously easy to break into. All you need is a hammer. I know because my daughter’s combination bicycle lock decided not to open. My first instinct was to cut into it, but all I had was a pair of wire cutters, which did not work. Next, good old WD40, which should actually have been my first thought. WD40, as brilliant of a product as it is, failed. 

I searched online how to break through this lock. Turns out, you just have to whack the combination lock portion several times with a hammer. Easy-peasy.

Really, not that easy though. It was an entire day’s project, and by noon the Wyoming temperatures sored to a whopping 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and for Wyoming, that makes one want to lock himself inside with the air conditioner while you stand in front of the refrigerator in nothing but one’s underwear. To be fair, this is in comparison to earlier in the year’s –23. But instead, I was outside, standing on the cement by the bicycle rack, hammer in hand, and the sun beating down on my neck. I was frustrated and mad and pounding on the lock and pounding on it and pounding on it. Then a neighbor walked up. “Excuse me, Sir, what are you doing?”

Okay, she didn’t ask me that, but I felt guilty. Like I was a bike thief, and I’ve had a bicycle stolen from me, and it’s a horrible, horrible feeling.

When I was a kid, my bicycle was white and blue, six gears, slick, thin, street tires and I flew down my town’s roads like a bird. That’s how it felt. How I remember feeling. I ride a bike still now at forty and overweight, but it is a clunky, old, yellow rental from the University. Twenty-five dollars a semester. And today’s feeling is not fun. It is a daily commute to work, and when the end of the day comes along, the very last thing I want to do is get on that bicycle and pedal uphill all the way with zero gears the fifteen plus blocks home. Especially in the
-23 weather, which I have done. If my bike lock had gotten stuck, I would have left the bicycle on the rack and taken the bus.

But my daughter’s bicycle, that is a different story. So I sweat in the sun and beat the heck out of that lock, and she could ride again like a bird, like I hope she does when she is all grown-up.

 

___

Going Down Hill on a Bicycle

By Henry Charles Beeching

A Boy’s Song

With lifted feet, hands still,
I am poised, and down the hill
Dart, with heedful mind;
The air goes by in a wind.
Swifter and yet more swift,
Till the heart with a mighty lift
Makes the lungs laugh, the throat cry:--
“O bird, see; see, bird, I fly.
“Is this, is this your joy?
O bird, then I, though a boy,
For a golden moment share
Your feathery life in air!”
Say, heart, is there aught like this
In a world that is full of bliss?
‘Tis more than skating, bound
Steel-shod to the level ground.
Speed slackens now, I float
Awhile in my airy boat;
Till, when the wheels scarce crawl,
My feet to the treadles fall.
Alas, that the longest hill
Must end in a vale; but still,
Who climbs with toil, wheresoe’er,
Shall find wings waiting there.

On Seagulls

The seagulls came earlier this month. They are violent birds, chasing away Wyoming’s winter black ravens. The seagulls scavenge from dumpsters and restaurant parking lots. They soar over the small park ponds in search of the few fish that are in this mountain-locked valley.

They are how I know it is spring in Laramie. May is unpredictable. One day, you’ll sport shorts and t-shirts, and the next day, or even sometimes within the next few hours, you’ll bundle in coats, scarves, and knit hats. As a Wyoming non-native, the snow drops out of the sky quick and unexpected, wet and windy. The seagulls are the harbingers of spring—how I know the long winter which began in early October finally suffers death-throws.

Snow is never far away. I’ve been told snow has fallen mid-July here, and if I look to the Snowy Range, their tops are never not covered in white. The gulls, though, they settle in and seem out of place without their ocean.

---

Grey Gull

By Robert Service

’Twas on an iron, icy day
I saw a pirate gull down-plane,
And hover in a wistful way
Nigh where my chickens picked their grain.
An outcast gull, so grey and old,
Withered of leg I watched it hop,
By hunger goaded and by cold,
To where each fowl full-filled its crop.
They hospitably welcomed it,
And at the food rack gave it place;
It ate and ate, it preened a bit,
By way way of gratitude and grace.
It parleyed with my barnyard cock,
Then resolutely winged away;
But I am fey in feather talk,
And this is what I heard it say:
“I know that you and all your tribe
Are shielded warm and fenced from fear;
With food and comfort you would bribe
My weary wings to linger here.
An outlaw scarred and leather-lean,
I battle with the winds of woe:
You think me scaly and unclean…
And yet my soul you do not know,
“I storm the golden gates of day,
I wing the silver lanes of night;
I plumb the deep for finny prey,
On wave I sleep in tempest height.
Conceived was I by sea and sky,
Their elements are fused in me;
Of brigand birds that float and fly
I am the freest of the free.
“From peak to plain, from palm to pine
I coast creation at my will;
The chartless solitudes are mine,
And no one seeks to do me ill.
Until some cauldron of the sea
Shall gulp for me and I shall cease…
Oh I have lived enormously
And I shall have prodigious peace.”
With yellow bill and beady eye
This spoke, I think, that old grey gull;
And as I watched it Southward fly
Life seemed to be a-sudden dull.
For I have often held this thought -
If I could change this mouldy me,
By heaven! I would choose the lot,
Of all the gypsy birds, to be
A gull that spans the spacious sea.