A Clover and a Bee

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson is the poet of enough. Dwelling in “possibility”, “a fairer house than prose”, she knows we don’t need the whole prairie to be happy. Consider this:

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —
 
Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —
 
I've known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

How many friends does a person need? If you have a good one, or two, can you close the valves of your attention? What else can the soul select and then stop, satisfied? If I could do that with everything – with food, work, stuff – then to be alive truly would be “Power… Omnipotence --Enough.”

 
It’s not just Dickinson. All poetry is about enough, really, because the poem stops when the writer feels he or she has said enough. Still, a small aspect of enough in poetry comes from small poems about small things.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

We get the taste and feel of the cold, juicy plums. We get the questions in our own mind – should I really do this to my friend? Should I really take these plums? And we get that feeling of guilty pleasure. That this is enough to make a poem and that these plums were enough for the speaker is somehow both incomprehensible and satisfying at the same time. It is the same with William Carlos Williams’ other famous small poem about the wheelbarrow. Is a wheelbarrow really enough for so much to depend on? Its mere existence in the world, its redness, next to the white of the chickens, is somehow integral, is enough to contemplate, to make a poem.

Sure, there are more complicated poems. But even they end, and thus at some point the writer said, “Enough. It’s done.”

But why should we single out poetry as being sole representative of enough? Other works of art – short stories, novels, paintings, essays (blog posts?) – also eventually end, their creators saying, “Enough.” And what about us humans? Our lives begin and end, and I don’t know if we have a creator per se, but eventually God or our DNA or the Higgs Boson steps in and says, “Enough.” And then we die, but was it enough, after all?

…would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

Maybe the fact that so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow is a reminder that our lives, too, are enough, that somewhere, somehow, something depends upon us, even if we are completely isolated, even if our only companions are chickens.

 

The following picture comes from http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/so-much-depends-upon-a-red-wheel-barrow, a collection of many permutations of this poem.