You can't have it all, but..

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.

Emily Levine

You can’t have it all, but

You can have the embryo of rage grown in the abdomen, nursed with mounting frustrations and tender acrimony. You can have the salt water and tears bite as another wave topples you off the board. 

The man you call your love glides back out with ease. He doesn’t look back. You struggle to match his movements, but are battered back by more waves. All the other times in the relationship that you felt alone and an impediment to your partner’s fun flood your mind. What dams were constructed to keep from birthing the bitter demon crack, and against your better judgement, you brace for something arduous and prolonged. Another wave, and the board smacks the back of your head. Below the surface, your water breaks. The birth is sudden, seizing your eyes and beauty with violence. The pain and bitterness unleashed match the relentless waves that push, pull, push, pull, push. All this under the calm blue sky, smokestacks of clouds in the distance.

You can have the realization that you don’t want to marry him after all because marriage felt like a trap from the beginning. You are not, were not, and never will be ready to commit to “I do”. Not to him, anyway. You can have the disappointment that, for all your effort to make the love work, it won’t.

And you can have the moment of surrender, the bliss that takes over after accepting the next wave without struggle, the freedom that comes from realizing that your life is yours and no one else’s, and that, no matter how guilt, pressure, or anger would leverage you further, you can choose the next course. 

You can’t have it all, but

You can have star-fall along porcelain,

a rainbow aurora made in the bystander’s eyes, invisible to the microscopics that call the teacup home, child of the corner stoplight’s starlight.

Perseid in miniature, revealed only in the Goldilocks zone of a head-tilt, 

White noise to the perfunctory and disinterested line of sight, yet such beauty to dare to rival even the heavens.

Psyche to Aphrodite, Ariadne to Athena, heaven on earth,

Радозналост

Поштовање за лепоту и изврсност

Опрост

Социјално знање

Почела сам нови енглеско-језични курс на “Coursera” који се зове “The Science of Well-Being”—“Наука о благостању”. Због короне и самосталности, кренула сам да се излечим лоших навика и мисли.

У истом кораку, желела бин да обновим и мало боље увежбам мој полако-изтечени матерни језик. Креативност води чест корист води већи креативност и тако даље. Трудићу се да сваки дан пробам превести нешто из било ког језика на српски.

Почећу са лепим речима од један од најсјајнијих бића ко је икад прошао кроз наше 21-векско време: господин Роџерс.

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

You can have the prickle of needles in your sides, psychosomatic or real, it’s hard to tell, and the anxiety brimming to panic brewing in your belly.

You can have the terror of mortality race through your imagination, prick prick, minding and reminding and reminding you that what awaits is an inevitable end, it’s only a matter of time and circumstance, and it could be now, now, now.

Nothing feels right.

You can have the mania of panic rise into your chest, twisting binds around the heart and giving the illusion that—thump-thump—thump-thump—despite your comfortable seat and erect spine and the calm hollows of your nose, you are drowning on air.

You can have past states of panic tickle your muscle memory, teasing, cajoling, tempting you to surrender in shame to the madman’s pit, mired in the mud of emotions and remote from rational thinking...

It’s a pit that you’ve visited before, but not in some time, and certainly not with your abdomen in such a state, prick prick...

Yes, this time it’s different. It’s new and exhausting and something is terribly wrong and are you really just going to sit there and let it happen?!!

The body doesn’t disclose the mysterious terror, but with the talent of a salesperson pitching an insurance deal, riddles your mind with all that could be going wrong, all going wrong, wrong, and why you must surrender, why you must flee, surrender, flee, flee, for if you don’t...

You can have glazed, unfocused eyes futilely seeking your lover’s face for assurance disconnect from your optic nerve and the fluorescent background of your work office continuing around you, two-dimensional and ignorant of, or perhaps complicit in, your inner turmoil.

You can have that descent.

You can have that descent halted by the locus of words firing through the crosshairs of your deft fingers in the keyboard, documenting, raging to keep sane.

Tap-taptaptap-taptap-tap—

The pattern of touch brings about a new rhythm of sound and experience, a shift in perspective, the optical illusion is now spinning from left to right, finally, finally, I can see it.

You can have the relief and tenacity of words, silent though they may be, ring glorious bells in your temples as they form from fingers, pulling your attention focus forward, forward, now, it’s fine, see?—DDUMM—it’s fine—DDUMM—look here—DDUMM—be still—

DDUMMM—

—

DDUMMMM—

—

DDUMMMMM—

—

DDUMMMMMM—

MMMMM—

MMMM—

MMM—

MM—

M...

Mmm, yes, you can’t have it all, but

You can’t have it all, but

You can have the crinkles of skin around her eyes mirror the joy about her mouth when we first came to visit, and every visit after that.

You can have the bright reflections of chlorine-blue water reflect and refract on her walls in decades-old summer, laughter and pizza-stained mouths rinsed clean in the depths of the pool.

You can have her husband, a dead ringer for the Grandfather Frost of old, step out and joke to you “is the water wet, children?”, and us sing back, “yes, of course!”, eyes and shoulders reddened from liquid, light, and time.

You can have the grief of Frost’s departure from this world, not to return at least by that vessel, and the visits to her home in the coming years, still joyful, but laced with something bitter...

Consuming grapefruit with the skin still on.

You can have her loneliness and sorrow seep out with every visit, in her kisses on your cheek, in the shape and unsteadiness of her feet upon the stained carpets, only to be flooded quickly by good spirits and laughter and gifts again.

You can have the visits to your father’s and Grandfather Frost’s graves, not too far apart in the communal cemetery, grapefruit skin and chopped onions prickling your eyes and mouth as you stand and support her arm,

Her petaled gifts marking memory before stony names.

You can have her voice but not her face speak to you while you work across the world, wording kindly but betraying much of her desperation to join her husband, her ennui with the world and the people in it, you among them—but she would never say so—who have left her behind.

And you can have the shock and denial of the news of her passing, peacefully and in her sleep thank goodness, just hours after life reminded you, by other means and other people, to cherish those you love.

Witness to nearly a century of human folly and grace, you can have an old woman return to whence she came, transfigured from the material to immaterial, and immortalized in the presence of robins and squirrels who fed from her hands once upon a time, peering in now through her glass doors, searching once more for the kindness of crumbled bread and sweet blue eyes.

You can’t have it all, but you can have the love of an old woman.

At least there is this.

You can’t have it all, but

You can have an epiphany a decade in the making break over your mind like a rotten egg, doomed and wasted and foul.

It chants that you are a long-broken person, and you do your best to ignore the verses of the psalm that echo “there’s no fixing it, there’s no fixing it...”

You can have your tears leaking through the cracks quickly mended by kisses from someone who has learned how to harvest gold from life,

Who has painted his own broken bits back together,

Who freely admits his kinship with Pagliacci but places neither judgment nor shame on his sorrow,

Who has found riches where the rich dare not set foot,

For the monsters of their own make that lurk, barring the way to the vault of constancy, would make ribbons of them should they attempt to cross.

You can have admiration for your lover take flight in the wild applause of your gaze as he makes fools of those who place less worth in themselves than they do in their possessions,

Who makes a mockery of the mad world’s worship of success, simply by existing,

Whose clumsy yet sublime mastery of life you, yourself, seek to possess, avaricious student that you are.

You can have sleepy breath beneath blankets on a cold early autumn morning, while your eyes dance across the ceiling perceiving the stars and your perspectives align into new constellations in the glorious void of understanding, awaiting better cosmologies to give meaning to their existence.

I’ve realized that it’s lonely with only me posting these tributes to the poem “You Can’t Have It All” by Emily Levine. It would be fun to include others’ takes on the “this” in “there is this”.

Here is the beginning:

You can’t have it all,

And here is the end:

But there is this.

Fill in the rest as you please.

You can’t have it all, but

You can have the epiphany of origami pumpkins and Halloween haikus five minutes before class begins,

And the recognition that despite previous preparation, more brilliant ideas tend to tumbleweed into the mind when you least expect.

You can have the delight in seeing students express themselves without any fear of failure or mistakes, a rarity.

You can have the crescent moon and a star (or possibly Venus) deck the sky on Halloween night, admiring the view of you, the pale blue dot,

While a horror story podcast breathes eerie music and supernatural fear down your neck as you make your way home in the dark under celestial eyes.

You can have the insomniac hours in the dead of night, anxiety riddled with footsteps on the stair you think you keep hearing just outside, a percussionist’s countdown to your doom—

You can have the blissful ignorance of waking, accompanied by the tentative peek of sunlight through your curtained eyes and the chatter of children and crows in the implacable distance of either dream or day,

And the rebirth of morning when your sight and memory are restored, and you realize that there was nothing to fear at all after all.

You can have the texture of freshly-picked rheum rolling in your index finger and thumb as you make your way to the bathroom,

And you can have the kernels of terror seize your stomach upon realizing that you have no face in your reflection, none at all...just blank skin...what—

You can’t have it all, but

You can have the young bartender who serves you 30-year-old sherry to impress you.

You can have him utter “hello, I love you” and mean it on the night of your first meeting.

And when it is summer, you can have steward of the earth in you bloom when an abandoned baby pigeon falls to the ground from above the bar.

You can have the seed of affection that grows when the bartender leaves his other customers to help you return the pigeon to its nest,

And the smell of his cologne mingling with cigarette smoke,

And the wart on his knuckle as you feel his hands on your body for the first time at dawn in the New Year.

You can have the simple speech of childhood returned to your amnesiac teeth, out of practice but necessary as you learn each other’s languages,

Your well-versed bodies writing epics softly in the night.

You can have the return of the baby pigeon now flown, keeping sentinel above the bar some nights.

You can have the leaves reveal their mortality come the falling of summer and the bartender’s caress upon returning from a long night, unheard haikus for “only you, you, you...”