— Barbara Ras, You Can't Have It All, from Bite Every Sorrow
[text: 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.]