On Waking from a Nap at Noon

When the surge of random

Happiness cleanses you,

You can’t help but return

To the notion that joy

Is largely stochastic

Fortune, as anyhow

As suffering but not

Often humanly sourced

The way suffering is,

Something that just comes up

Like the wind or the blue

Gap in grey through which sun

Pours through, at the world’s end

Somewhere, always that

Sense of loosed awareness

Detached from most of life

And its anxious centers,

Even in a city.

You could be on a train,

People packed to the gills,

Or in a central square,

When peace overtakes you,

Like Yeats at his table,

Empty cup, open book,

In a busy London

Shop, when his body blazed

And, twenty minutes, more

Or less, it seemed so great

My happiness. Those two—

A sense of the world’s edge,

A sense of bounded time—

Are traits contentment brings

In its wake, peculiar

In being redolent

Of melancholy, both

Of them, core traits of peace.