you can't have it all

But you can have eating wild grapes and their skin like beetle wings
cocooned in bruises. You can have swings that go so high you kick
a hole in the clouds. You can have chickens following you through the front door
and the cat’s gift to say, Look, I am taking care of you.
You can have happiness, but tempered as
your first taste of wine when you hid your puckering face
because you were eight years old and dangerous.
You can have a touch you blush for, ferret hands dancing,
small and terrifying and knowledgable.
You can have an aspiration of “us” held on one stool leg, darting breaths but
never admitting to dreams, to a stew of practicality.
You can talk to her, sometimes,
and even mean something.
You can have the book you stole after she stumbled,
and “that” word sank into your hands. You can’t cure cancer,
but you can have two sets of spoons in the same sink
although she’s only touched the one you lent her,
the one you didn’t expect back.
And you can laugh about crocheting,
about the anxious quilts, the way they’re half yarn, half overthinking,
about searching for a pen in your hair,
about the phone that does everything but call.
You can have the hospital dream:
the stolen lightbulbs, the shivering hallways,
the way you always wake before you drop yourself, like a wine glass, from a bridge.
You can have a new book, for a few pages,
rooms shaking with leaves, white birds on the hand, wings tense.
You can’t hope for love to find you in the cereal aisle,
but here’s that girl, in all her delicacy, that taught you how to taxiderm,
to take care of anything but people until you can’t recognize faces.
Now, watch the world sideways, relearn breathing.
And here’s chicories, chamomile tea,
night breathing at the window, the company of rush hour traffic,
“get well soon” balloons pushing up at the ceiling, coming undone
over scars that are all healing wrong. And when you fail her,
remember how you ate her favorite food for days after she died,
how you almost stopped on the interstate for her favorite song,
how you dreamed.
It will be there, if you catch it while it’s not looking,
beating into the air like frightened bird,
you can’t have it all, but you can have this.