Most poems about mortality reach for something grand: a cathedral, a battlefield, the stars. "Wheelbarrow" by Hysteresis Monkey, dated 21 February 2008, starts with a tool lying under brush by a stream. It begins as a plain report ("This morning I saw / on Lexington Road") and ends in a question that is harder to answer than it first sounds.
The opening sentence is built like a witness statement, with a time, a place and a list of details. One detail does quiet work: the wheelbarrow lies "by a well-manicured house." The house is tidy and the wheelbarrow is not, so the neat lawn sets off the rot rather than hiding it. The line describing the decay is also the longest in the stanza, "rotting into the ground under a pile of brush," and it seems to sink along with its subject. Just before it, "overturned" gets a line to itself, like an upturned object left stranded on the page.
The second stanza moves from the thing seen to a general claim: "We none of us can maintain our worlds / keep them in good repair / and proper order. All decays." The verdict arrives without commas or softening. The first two lines run on like a tired list, and then "All decays" shuts them down in two flat words. The phrase "good repair / and proper order" sounds like a landlord's checklist, which makes the cosmic point feel oddly domestic.
The speaker then walks on, and the poem walks with them. "I am on Thoreau's railbed, I think" is hesitant, and that "I think" makes the speaker a wanderer who isn't quite sure where they are. The name Thoreau suggests a literary walk, and a railbed is itself something that once did a job and has since been left behind. Then comes a graveyard that goes "on and on," and the repeated phrase makes the dead seem endless. "Lives that came and went" is the plainest line in the poem, with no ornament at all.
What follows is the poem's best surprise. The graveyard "produced, evidently, headstone-carvers / who survived them." The word "evidently" is a dry piece of deduction, as if the speaker were reading the cemetery for clues. The line is faintly funny and also moving. The only proof that these people lived is the work of someone who made a lasting object for them. Yet the carvers are gone too, and only their craft remains.
That thought leads to the quietest moment in the poem, a stanza of one line: "Someone made the wheelbarrow new, once." The speaker imagines the rotting object as freshly made, with a maker behind it. The poem's attention shifts here, from decay to the human act that precedes it.
The ending hesitates. "So what I crave to know / is / is someone somewhere building a wheelbarrow today?" The word "crave" is surprisingly strong in such a low-key voice. The stranded "is," repeated at the start of the next line, reads like a stumble. The speaker seems to be gathering nerve to ask something that sounds silly and isn't. The final line pushes the question into the future, "Will someone again build a wheelbarrow tomorrow?" and then stops with no answer. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, and its short, conversational lines follow the pace of someone thinking while walking. A neat closing couplet would have given false comfort, so the question is left open.
The title and the object probably recall William Carlos Williams's famous "red wheel barrow," though that is my inference, since the poem never mentions it. If the echo is intended, the contrast is sharp. Williams's poem says that "so much depends" on a wheelbarrow, while this one shows a wheelbarrow nobody depends on any more. The question at the end is what the poem is about. Decay is taken as certain. The speaker worries instead about whether people will keep making useful, ordinary things, and in a poem so full of graves that worry reads as a form of hope.