I needed to be made to feel that there was real,
permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation.
Wordsworth taught me this, not only without
turning away from, but with a greatly increased
interest in the common feelings and common
destiny of human beings.
—J. S. Mill
Out walking in my nature-or-nurture,
culture-or-creature, we-are-all-fucked
funk, I wandered like great-browed Wordsworth
lonely as a cloud upon his daffodils,
ruined abbeys, and sagacious peasant workers
eager to engage in earnest dialogue with
and spark a personal-but-socially-useful meditation for
a happening-to-be-strolling-by major British poet
and happened myself upon
a wackily painted California-beach-town clunker
with a strikingly somber
NEVER FORGET GOD white-on-black bumper sticker
precisely centered on its back bumper.
I thought, “That’s straight out of Flannery O’Connor,”
only she’d have the car hurtling through,
packed with a family masterfully
tormenting one another,
or loaded with murderers
on their way to a murder, or idling
while its owner (an itinerant preacher—
half Christ, half con man, all heartbreaker)
performs some grace-provoking mischief
on a spinster. I don’t know who
owns this car and I certainly don’t want to know,
but were he a guest on Wordsworth’s call-in show,
I’d ask him from anonymous distance, “Never forget God?
How do you do that? My faith comes and goes.
I can’t even speak about it without distortion.
Never forget: is that the same as always remember?
Who remembers anything always?” At that point,
he’d probably answer, “Just a minute,”
and, switching the control dial back to Flannery O’Connor,
he’d reach into the glove compartment
for the gleaming, silver, startlingly high-tech
automatic pistol and the pack of evangelical pamphlets
from which he slips one with a rubber-band snap
that makes me jump as if he’d clicked the gun,
a pamphlet that on my walk home I would curl into
a little glossy telescope, focus on a flower,
and toss into the next garbage can
after this unwordsworthy contemplation of nature
reminded me to retune and retune
and retune my attention,
which the car had already done,
it being
adorned, as I have not yet said, with multicolor
lightning bolts, asterisks, question marks,
and squiggles, a ’74 Dodge Dart Swinger (I think)
that no doubt in previous incarnations
served emotionally less expressive owners
ferrying children to soccer practice and doctors
and all the-world-is-too-much-with-us getting-and-spending
required of us to earn moments of private life and quiet pleasure
(its dead shocks perhaps once cushioning
the hurried rhythms of backseat lovers)—
whose paint job (whatever muted colors it had been then)
now features a purple trunk-spanning skull and crossbones
above the NEVER FORGET GOD bumper sticker,
and one modestly trussed mermaid in red-polka-dot halter
reclining along the entire length of the passenger side
from rear to front fender, with what little space
left in the negative space around her
maniacally scratched in with tiny druidic glyphs,
which, could we read them, would rebuke us
for our idolatrous, splintered common life.