Glazed with Rain Water

I woke this morning to the sound of rain on the porch roof. And the William Carlos Williams poem came to mind:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Without the "so much depends upon" part it's a perfectly good haiku; with it, it's much more. OK, so what depends then? I don't know, and Williams didn't say. But the older I get, the more I think that it's a poem about existence. Not simple existence, because there's nothing simple about it, not mere existence either. Existence per se, I guess.

Monday I took the cat in for what I, in my innocence, supposed was a followup sort of checkup visit. The cat would be pronounced in splendid fettle and we'd go home and find something to do for the balance of the afternoon. But the film showed that the last kidney stone hadn't moved, so they had to do something about it. The doctor was showing and explaining and talking about the different options and all I really could think of was how much I wanted to yell and kick things. Then the blood work came back and the number of options shrank to one—the big operation.

They did that yesterday, and it went well. Now they have to address his kidney failure. The doctor is famous; she may be the best in the country, and she may be the best in the world. But my little guy's paws are walking right on the cliff edge that defines the line between Here and Gone.

I'm able to step back and see this is just one little quotidian drama in a big world full of them. It's odd: I feel compelled to explain to the doctors just what I find so affecting about the little creature, as if it would make a difference, as if they would go into a special cabinet and bring out the extra-effective medicine if they understood. I know this is crazy, that it verges on magical thinking, that the whole veterinary hospital stands there, that people come and go, that the light bill is paid and deliveries made, all of that happens because they understand that people love their pets. And yet the compulsion is still there, the way a little old man will tell a cardiac surgeon a story about the day he and his wife met.

But I don't need other people to care, really. It's just one story out of many. Cats get sick, and they get better or they don't. But it was interesting to me to read that the poem was written about a scene Williams saw through the window of a home in Passaic, New Jersey. Williams, a physician, was there attending to a very sick young girl, so sick he was afraid she would die. He looked out the window, saw a wheelbarrow and chickens, and somehow the scene resolved itself into a poem that is widely anthologized today. I wondered, when I read about that, did she live? And if she did, did she ever find out about the poem?

I just thought it was odd that the poem came to my mind this morning, after I read about what was happening—a doctor, sitting in a room with a sick girl and her concerned family, looking out the window as he wondered what he could  do, thinking about white chickens and red wheelbarrows and the falling rain.