A warm, humid, still summer morning. Having slept deep my old body tingles with anticipation. Old isn’t always old, only now and then.

                  To hell with the headlines, I want to feel good. When was the last time something happy happened? Sports raise spirits, but I don’t follow sports. Among my goofy diversions is feeling smug about the hours I’ve saved not watching televised sports. No baseball, basketball, football, World Cup, tennis. No Superbowl or Run for the Roses! Saved time, though, isn’t worth much unless profitably invested. Now not so smug.

                  My trick for prolonging good feeling is to swallow a poem. A mind preoccupied cannot grump and moan, cannot bewail the state of our nation or fatuity of our kind. Cannot worry about lumps, aches, friends confronting diagnoses. Or about something amiss with one’s computer (app-y is the opposite of happy). Cannot focus on anything other than the poem, as a hypnotist demands attention to his swinging timepiece (that’s the cliché anyway). Prose can be skimmed, but a poem read inattentively isn’t read at all. You might as well play golf!

                  I keep a stash of potential treats in my skull as we keep M and M’s in a crystal jar by the front door, within easy reach.  If I have to rummage for a diversion, my brain might opt for a peek at the news and goodbye good feeling.

                  Ah, here’s one – the tiniest of confections – but when I reencountered it yesterday it packed a punch. It shows up in manuscript around 1530 but is presumed much older. Its slightly archaic English intensifies its charm: the speaker is distant from us but not that distant.  Alternative versions of our native tongue delight us if we can decode them and dismay us if we cannot. I remember a glum feeling watching that great television series, The Wire. Here were my compatriots, speaking our common language, and I couldn’t fathom a word.

                  Read this aloud:

Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,
The smalle rayne downe can rayne.
Cryst, if my love were in my armes,
And I in my bed agayne.

If it didn’t stab you, read it again. If it did, you won’t need urging. I think I read it ten times in wonderment. What’s its secret?

                  Music, for starters. Those alliterations in line one, repetitions in line two (repeating a word in a poem is a dicey business: its second appearance must accomplish something akin yet distinct, or we’ll dismiss it irritably).

                  The immediacy of those first twelve words tingles, as if we’ve been transported to distant vivid place. In my mind, the speaker is a mariner on the deck as rain drizzles. The scene might be bucolic, charming – the rain is small – were it not for that pistol shot: “Cryst!” Those colliding consonants and long-i vowel crack into our consciousness like an alarm clock into a dream. (The music of the first two lines is hypnotically smooth.) Likewise the dying Savior. This Cryst is not just a familiar expletive, it is the young man himself on his cross, a yelp of pain. The mariner’s loneliness (like Christ’s at that moment) is intolerable: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!”

                  The succeeding eleven words couldn’t be gentler or sweeter. Our speaker’s pain recedes as he recalls his ladylove in his arms, together in their bed. The mysterious balm of glad recollection. “Today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” All may yet be well.

                  I am smiling now – in your comfortable company – remembering the goodness that awaits. I can face the headlines.