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"What Am I Supposed To Do With All This Happiness?"

(following "The Needle, The Thread" by Danielle Cadena Deulen, reproduced and reviewed here)

What am I supposed to do with all this happiness?

What is Texas supposed to do with all this rain?

What is Finland supposed to do with the sunlight
On those magical evenings
When the Baltic can seem gentle and benign?
When a lover's caress would not seem out of place,
Somehow.

What is the shop owner supposed to do
With all his melting ice cream
After a hurricane has come through
And knocked out the power?

This can't be what is meant to be maximized.
This giddiness, this is not what is good in me.
Maximize something else, anything else, it doesn't matter.
Maximize the feeling of the cold wind on a buffalo's face.
Maximize the chances that a north Atlantic seabird will survive the rats and the pollution
To dive into the frigid water one more time
And emerge cold and exultant in the piercing air,
Beak like a knife.

If I were you, I would pour that fucking ice cream down the drain.
When the winter comes, you won't lose only the sunlight
You will lose the memory of it too, or if the memory persists
All the feeling will be stripped away,
And it will be reduced to an object of empty lust,
So flat and pornographic that philosophers might wonder how it can refer
To anything real.

What am I supposed to do with all this happiness?
It is a matter of some urgency.