half-tipsy with the wonder of being alive

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

—Alden Nowlan (1933-1983) "Great Things Have Happened," from What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread, Nineties Press, 1993. (I first encountered this poem on tumblr, and tracked it down to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, which is an invaluable source for my National Poetry Month posts.)

To be fair, I do have a lot of feelings about the moon landing, although it didn't happen in my lifetime. (I frequently think fond, slightly sad thoughts about that one fic I wrote that one time about Steve Rogers watching the footage of the moon landing that I can't actually post because it's a sequel to a story I'm never going to finish and a prequel to a story I'm never going to write, and it doesn't really work out of context.) But anyway. I like this poem.