YOU CAN’T HAVE IT ALL by Barbara Ras
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.

Prompt two: Inertia?
If no poem comes is
there a place it didn't
come from and can
I go there? Please?

Day Two
Cast Iron
My brother's wife was taking his cast iron pots to the donation bin.
Everyone in my family was taught that you had to have cast iron pots and
you had to keep them forever
god forbid, some disaster ended you
and they were lost until a bunch of
archeologists could dig them up.
Even still they'd be good,
just needing bit of scrubbing and seasoning.
No one outside our family
can understand this
need to hang on
to something so
impossibly
heavy.
or why we tell a history hidden behind a patina of alteration
So we conspire.
I tell him I will go to Value Village
and buy them all back
—give them to her for Christmas—
adding another chapter in the mythology of our persistence and our resilience.
Laughing, because that’s what we do.

Day Three
When I was small, I thought
“pass me the honey honey”
or the “sugar sugar”
was how you asked,
so I didn’t know why everyone laughed
my first time away from my family.
Even now, in my head
there is the honey honey and
the sugar sugar
but I don’t say them aloud.

Day Five
I wrote a poem today!
I didn’t even let it rise in some warm and safe place in my brain
I just coughed it out
Or drank it down
Or shook it free
Or, or, or…geez.
maybe it wasn't very good but it felt really good.

Day Five
Winter, the air was as dry as unbuttered toast.
Ice formed from any moisture and hung onto any thread.
Children were bundled so if they fell
it would be face up
so they wouldn’t suffocate,
their identities unknowable behind scarves and hats pulled low.
Until a Chinook
when they threw off their stiff winter clothes
and ran in their socks and shirt sleeves
in yards of mud,
no, not ran, but hopped
like new little toads with tails abandoned,
this way and that,
with the randomness of joy.
And when it was over
they came home dressed in other children’s winter clothes.


Day Six
Not Haiku
Sometimes when I'm riding my bike
a fully formed haiku will pop into my head.
I swerve and then recover knowing
that
by the time I get home it will be gone,
drifted off on the wind
to seed the mind of some poet
who is more righteous and unencumbered
by things like
gravity, velocity and time.
And often while I put away the groceries
I find there was a coupon*
I forgot to use too.
fuck

Day Seven
Quilts become stories
independent of empires.
With heads bowed
women
stitched hopes and secrets that survived in the fibers,
There was no permanence for those who by law
owned
not even what was thrown away
so
they threaded their lives into this craft.
they borrowed from every garments incarnation each cherished scrap
threading a different history, a history that included them;
Undaunted by limitations
and buoyed by the joy of expression.
Empires will always fall and all art becomes fatuous
but quilts become stories.

So, once I heard, (thanks to a pre-recorded jazz show on BBC radio two) I wrote this:



Give me Billy Holiday

What can I say?,
I'm a sucker for the sway
Don't give me modern
give me a dip and a good sashay,
soapy Billie jazz
that's a little bit sad,
a sultry-eyed lover
a good talker--no truth,
smoky air, whiskey and a corner booth.
I've been alone,
got myself to blame.
Before too long
I'll be alone again,
and you know
I think I might love you
and so
lets see what a little moonlight can do.

--from Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986

It's been a while so please bare with me...

Prompt: Love
Genre: poetry/humour
word count: less than a hundred

Less Than Super LOVE


I found myself falling.
Before this
your eyes: luminous blue skies
and then
the head long tumbling into flights of sighs,
lashes kissing clouds
And then,
yes I still want to be friends,
I never saw it coming
my final undoing,
the uncaring ground.

If I could have had a skin
transparent and yet impenetrable
like superhero armour
(that still let me fit into that
skinny dress)
I would not have made such a mess.

I could have held it in.
if I had that kind of superhero skin.

Crazy Quilt
The textures
of the many distant lives I waved goodbye to
are measured and added to the quilt,
warm in this winter of my life.