Reponse to Barbara Ras' poem "You Can't Have It All"
You Can’t Have It All
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown
hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold
hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.
From Bite Every Sorrow by Barbara Ras, published by Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Copyright © 1997 by Barbara Ras. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
I was introduced to this poem recently. I have trouble with
not wanting it all. I want to travel and plan trips and also not feel
afraid that everything will go wrong. Each time I think: Easy peasy, there won’t
be any anxiety this time—and surely, every time, there is a feeling in the pit
of me, a giant nut in the gut, and I have to ask my son-in-law to pat my head
and tell me everything will be all right (What does he know?) before I take off
for Timbuktu.
I worry—against all reason—about money, food (always worried
I haven’t packed a lunch???). These are stand-ins for that other horrible
feeling that there was something I was supposed to do and forgot and now the
floor beneath me will drop out. Believe me, the floor drops out at least a
couple times a week.
Or that I’m supposed to be writing or exercising or
something other than what I’m already doing. It’s this distraction, diversion,
unfocused life-living that bothers me. I can’t have it all or stop my mind from
racing or my spirit or soul from being overwhelmed by sensory input, negative
thoughts, or the fact that my house is infested with fruit flies circling
around my coffee area even though I moved the compost bucket, then washed it
out, and have committed to emptying it daily, though I’ve backslidden already
with that promise—but I can stop, and re-direct my thoughts: To what is here.
To the Now.
The coarse salt on top of my seedy cracker that I love to
lick off. (As I bat away the fruit flies!) I say thank you.
I love the bit about the clean towel. There is nothing
better than a nice fluffy clean towel that smells like manufactured lavender as
if fresh from the dryer to make me feel so glad to be human. Grateful for the
small stuff. For a hot cup of tea—even though I might have to microwave it nine
times because of all the interruptions, despite the fact that the store I shop
at has discontinued my favorite brand. Having it all is over-rated when I can
sit outside at sunset by the fire pit, with or without a fire, and watch the sky
go all gold and orange and mauve and the bats flitting through the dusky
twilight. Sometimes, just looking outside at my lawn chair, waiting, makes me
happy.
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