A Poet from New Jersey
For weeks I have been trying to tell the story of William Carlos Williams as part of my Sunday Sermon. If he were alive, I doubt he’d impressed. After all, one of his poems, Pastoral, has these lines:
The old man who goes about
Gathering dog lime
Walks in the gutter
Without looking up
And his tread
Is more majestic than
That of the Episcopal minister
Approaching the pulpit
Of a Sunday.
Truth be told I might share some of Williams view that there are many things more majestic than an Episcopal Minister…and I am an Episcopal Minister.
What I like about Williams is his ability to focus attention on things of everyday. One of his most ambitious poems, Paterson, was made into a film in 2016. The movie imagines the words written by Williams as the thoughts of a bus driver.
Unlike an Episcopal Minister I doubt he’d object to the ruminations of someone whose job is not to pause dramatically and speak eloquently; but rather to stop when he needs to and keep his eyes on the road. This is the kind of everyday that Williams drew his readers attention to. It was different than his day job as Medical Physician. In between the identity of poet and Doctor Williams forged another way of seeing.
I’m grateful for the Pastoral of Williams imagination as well as that of other writers he inspired like Rick Barot. May their Pastoral and point of view guide not only our imagination; but our ability to welcome more people, places, and things as spiritual gifts to be cared for.
This is my pastoral: that used-car lot where someone reads Song of Myself over the loudspeaker all afternoon, to customers who walked among the cars mostly absent to what they heard, except for the one or two who looked up into the air, as though they recognized the reckless phrases hovering there with the colored streamers, their faces suddenly loose with a dreamy attention.
This is also my pastoral: once a week, in the apartment above, the prayer group that would chant for a sustained hour. I never saw them, I didn’t know the words they sang, but I could feel my breath running heavy or light as the hour’s abstract narrative unfolded, rising and falling like cicadas, sometimes changing in abrupt turns of speed, as though a new cantor had taken the lead.
…
If, by pastoral, we mean a kind of peace, this is my pastoral: walking up Grand Avenue, down Sixth Avenue, up Charing Cross Road, down Canal, then up Valencia, all the way back to Agua Dulce Street, the street of my childhood…
And this is also my pastoral: in 1502, when Albrecht Dürer painted the young hare, he painted into its eye the window of his studio.
The hare is the color of a winter meadow, brown and gold, each strand of fur like a slip of grass holding an exact amount of the season’s voltage.
And the window within the eye, which you don’t see until you see, is white as a winter sky, though you know it is joy that is held there.
