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But there is this

I had a couple of good walks with Bibi today. She was sweet and cooperative, wagged her tail at me – she’s not very demonstrative, so you have to watch for the subtle responses in her eyes, ears and posture that show she’s happy to see you. Our misunderstanding is forgotten, though the tiny remnant of the bite on my arm itches and I have visions of it late at night when I’m about to fall asleep. Silly, really. Sensitivities like this really annoy me sometimes, the way the minor assaults of life – being yelled at by some idiot, a snap from a defensive dog – can repeat on me. I’m lucky nothing really bad has happened to me. The traumas that you hear about in the news inflicted on innocent people in war zones or just in some house where someone’s in the wrong place at the wrong time – I can’t imagine how people survive them, or how people inflict them for that matter.

 

Well, back to my little world… I’m feeling good because I managed to complete and send in a draft of some copy I needed to get to my clients – marketing copy for a private school, sounding so wonderful I want to shrink back down to childhood and go there myself, or have children just so I can send them there. And there’s a light at the end of the tunnel on this big, technical project I’ve been grinding out – more work to do yet, but definitely nearing the end. I’m hoping next week while I’m dog- and house-sitting for my friends I’ll get some free time – maybe write some, read some, enjoy what's left of summer. It’s also nice for once to relax a bit knowing I have new projects expected next month, as well as income from the work I’ve been doing lately. It’s been a challenge, but I always feel good having waded into the chaos of a new assignment and, piece by piece, made sense of it and organized and tweaked it into shape. Something I guess one can’t ever really do in one’s personal life, but in work and in creative projects it’s both possible and very satisfying.

You Can't Have It All

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.

From Bite Every Sorrow by Barbara Ras, published by Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Copyright © 1997 by Barbara Ras. All rights reserved.

 

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Quackers

“So, uh, what’s new with you guys?”

 

“Come here often?”

 

“Either of you fine ladies care to dance?”

 

“So a duck walks into a bar…”

 

“You know, er, I own a condo right on this pond…”

 

“So you guys hear about the jet ski incident?”

 

Supply your own dialogue here ______

 

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