When Does Happiness Arrive?

Tina Schumann

Pete Townshend

Word Count 189

With the husband making coffee at the kitchen sink,

his t-shirt still warm with sleep. The cat blinking

from her window perch and the coreopsis

still in bloom behind her. With the neighbor’s bamboo

swaying in autumn light and the single white mushroom

in the front lawn that appears and disappears in a day.

Anything that says I am not inert

matter. I can be jolted awake

by the everydayness of the world.

Blindsided while channel surfing

on a Tuesday night of dull television

and suddenly there’s Pete Townshend,

seventy-six and mostly deaf still windmilling

his pitcher's arm across the face of a Stratocaster.

Still gripping on to the neck

of whatever he has left to give.

His almost libidinous hunger for noise

and grit and motion and giving

the crowd what they still crave

radiating from the whole of his long body.

All these decades later – the mutual joy

reverberates. What does happiness mean

anyway? That you breath? That despite

the damaged world you will stumble on it

when you need it most and that you are

willing to let your fingers go bloody in the pursuit.

*

Tina is a Pushcart nominated poet and the author of three poetry collections, Praising the Paradox (Red Hen Press, 2019) which was a finalist in the National Poetry Series, Four Way Books Intro Prize and the Julie Suk Award; Requiem. A Patrimony of Fugues (Diode Editions, 2017) which won the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition and As If (Parlor City Press, 2010) which was awarded the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared widely since 1999, including The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Cimarron Review, Hunger Mountain Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nimrod, Palabra, Parabola, Poetry Daily, Rattle, Verse Daily, and read on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. www.tinaschumann.com