What So Much Depends Upon

We're sitting in history class and professor clicks to the next powerpoint slide.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

 ~{William Carlos Williams, 1923}

The air is aWkwArD. It feels....

too simple.  Uncomfortably so.

I scan the class from my perch in the back of the classroom, --{I always sit here to survey... I watch.}-- upholstered bucket seats & stadium seating fall in terrace below my lookout.

My eyes stop on slouched basketball star, his hair braided in thick rows.  He frowns at the poem, no doubt unimpressed, re-reading, thinking there must be more.

I shift in my seat, half-waiting for someone to say what we're all thinking.  "Yes..and??"

Lectures on the 1920s & Modernism showcase this period's willingness to "risk a certain amount of incoherence and experimentation in order to challenge preconceived notions of value and order."

Professor says, "I wrote my entire dissertation on this William Carlos Williams poem."

But how to eek out meaning in sixteen words of apparent randomness describing an arbitrary scene? & exactly what "depends upon" it? 

Yet, isn't this a lesson to learn?  This challenging preconceived ideas of beauty, of significance, of ways of life?  Taking each moment as meaningful & each breath as bread?

I feel the moment suspend, one moment of life that I could let pass and forget for it's assumed insignificance. 

In the margin of my notes I scratch down:

so much depends

upon

a brow knit

together

perched on tiered

seating

searching for meaning

in quotidian.