I am no Wordsworth,
but I’m on the way to a gig
playing drums with Brian
and I was thinking about that poem,
you know the one,
the one he writes about how
lovely everything is around
Tintern Abbey while he’s walking
and thinking about his sister.
It’s a beautiful poem.
One of my favorites.
I’m driving to the gig down
Interstate 205, but when
I take the Stafford Road exit,
even though I’m driving,
I have some inkling of how
he must’ve felt about the land
and the trees and the sky
and his sister. This won’t be
nearly as long as Wordsworth’s poem
and not nearly as good,
but I’m running out of time
to write my fourth poem of the month
and I’m using voice-to-text in order
to write the damn thing
totally on the fly and the title came to me
seemingly out of nowhere
as I was thinking about playing
the rock music in an old church
in Wilsonville, driving down
a road I’d like to think was named
after another famous William.
Our own. I think it’s a good title.
And this is the best I could do
for a poem in the moment–
which is really all we can
ask of ourselves, ever.
michael jarmer 