Okay, it is Friday, so we might as well take a moment to be moved by something, don’t you think? Here, then. Read this poem by Barbara Ras. It’s long but…soldier on, I believe in you.
YOU CAN’T HAVE IT ALL
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.
This poem is perfect, as is. It’s full of tiny beautiful things and reminders of how to pay attention. It also has rhythm and cadence and a lilt that makes me want to read it again and again, and I love how it spills smoothly from concrete and understandable (the cat purring, the eleven-year-old waking you up) into the realm of fanciful, confusing, nebulous ideas (the farms in the mind, buses that kneel)—and then just when you think the poem has lost you, and you’d need a college professor to explicate it all, it steers you right back into safe waters with the black swan on the pond and the peanut butter and your mother’s voice.
I wouldn’t change a word in it. And I could never emulate it, but I could make a list of my own in the same spirit. You should, too.
Despite not being able to have it all—despite quarantine and bold screaming news headlines and nagging worries and hardships that no doubt lie in wait like silenced house alarms ready to be tripped into high volume—you can have so much.
You can have the comforting heft of a new hardcover book, its pages smooth and stiff, rippling satisfyingly like a new deck of cards when you flip through them.
You can have the silver flash of a fish as it turns in the water below you, the scales on its underbelly catching the sunlight just so.
And you can have the sun too, and sunrise—paddleboarding at 7 AM this morning while the sun rises quickly like an eager balloon over the green shoreline beyond you, the round glowing globe looking like a fat, juicy orange peach, so big you feel like you could reach up and pluck it out of the slowly lightening sky.
You can have conversations with your neighbors: two women in their 60s who stand in one’s yard discussing the merits of mulching early in the fall or late, and how to best to care for French bearded irises that bloom only once a year.
You can have the warmth of the clothes straight out of the dryer, soft against your chest as you gather them in your arms and trudge up the stairs, trailing stray socks, to drop them on the chair in the bedroom.
(And no, I’m sorry, but you cannot have the attendant satisfaction of having folded all the laundry in tidy piles because you are HUMAN and folding laundry is reeeallllll low on ye ole’ priority list.)
You can have pizza, its crust charred and blistered prettily around the edges, topped with creamy fresh ricotta and slices of fennel and roasted broccoli rabe.
You can have the surprise of a baby laughing when you swing the clean sheets high above his head as you make the bed, effervescent giggles erupting from his chubby cheeks in staccato bursts that fill the room—if they were visible, they’d be iridescent soap bubbles: delicately beautiful things that make it impossible not to smile back.
You can have all the memories you want. You can summon those in an instant: trail runs in the crisp fall evening air in New England; the taste of warm homemade applesauce; stream-walking with your three sisters and your stout Yorkshire pig splashing happily alongside you, following obediently in step with your dog; the prickly feeling of cucumbers on the vine; a first kiss; a fortieth kiss; a one hundredth kiss; the slithering sensation of frog eggs, their long slippery strands impossible to hold onto as you bend down at the edge of the pond to poke at them; flannel sheets in wintertime; hours of sledding on snowy days, the numbness growing on your wrists when bits of snow reach the vulnerable spot between your jacket sleeve and mitten, crusting the wool in ice.
You can have Nutella-smothered crepes on the street in Barcelona and your first taste of tequila in a boy’s dorm room in an ivy-covered stone turret and the sweaty flush of victory after a field hockey game, feeling strong and invincible and exhausted in your short red uniformed skirt, the number 16 emblazoned on your back.
You can have bare feet on the deck of a sailboat on a lake in Vermont and slightly doughy, undercooked blueberry pancakes over a campfire on a hill high above that lake. You can have your dad’s hand-drawn Valentine cartoons in red Sharpie on white computer paper and the buttery taste of Club crackers and once, the coldest water you’ve ever felt on a polar bear plunge in an alpine lake in the Swiss Alps.
You can have bread—warm from the oven—smothered in herbed butter.
And despite everything else, that’s absolutely within reach. Here you go. Have it.
Herbed Pull-Apart Bread
Adapted from King Arthur
For the dough
1 cup (227g) milk
4 tablespoons (57g) unsalted butter, cold
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 teaspoons salt
2 eggs
2 teaspoons instant or active dry yeast
4 to 4 1/4 cups (482g to 510g) all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons (21g) potato flour (optional, helps to make the bread tender)
For the filling
8 tablespoons (113g; 1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary (or other fresh herbs)
1 clove garlic, minced (optional)
To make the dough: On the stovetop or in the microwave, heat the milk with the butter, sugar, and salt, stirring until the butter is just melted. Set aside to cool slightly (it doesn’t need to be room-temperature, but you don’t want it piping hot).
Once slightly cooled, add the milk mixture to the bowl of a stand mixer and add the eggs, yeast, 4 cups of the flour, and potato flour (if using). Mix using the dough hook until the dough comes together, then continue to knead with the dough hook until the dough is smooth.
This is a sticky dough, but it shouldn’t be wildly sticky or wet—if it is, go ahead and add the remaining 1/4 cup of flour. Before you do, make sure you’ve kneaded it for at least 5 minutes—often it just needs time to smooth out so don’t add the flour right away even if it looks quite sticky. You can always add more but you can’t subtract!
Place the dough in a lightly greased bowl (a large one), cover loosely with plastic wrap, and allow to rise at room temperature or in a warm-is area for about 1 1/2 hours, or until quite puffy.
While the dough rises, make the filling by mixing together all the ingredients in a small bowl and grease two 8 1/2” x 4 1/2” loaf pans.
Once the dough has risen, roll it out on a lightly greased surface. (The dough is sticky-ish so I prefer to use a greased surface rather than a floured one, but you could also use a touch of flour to prevent it from sticking. If you use flour, be very careful not to use too much because that’s all flour that you’re introducing to the dough which can affect the final texture of the baked bread.)
You’ll want to roll the dough to roughly a 13” wide circle—it should be about 1/4” thick.
Using a large biscuit cutter or the lid of a large Mason jar, cut circles out of the dough—the circles should be about 4” wide.
Working with one dough circle at a time, spread a generous spoonful of filling over the circle, fold it in half, and place it in your prepared loaf pan with the rounded edge up.
Continue with the rest of the dough circles: you’ll use half of them to fill one pan and half in the other. They won’t fit snugly, but they’ll expand during the second rise.
Cover each pan loosely with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature for somewhere between 1 to 1 1/2 hours—the dough should be puffy and have expanded to fill the pans.
When the rising time has almost elapsed, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Uncover the pans (sometimes I brush the loaves with melted butter) and pop them in the oven. Bake for about 25 minutes—it may take closer to 30 but start checking at 25. The bread is ready when the tops are a light golden brown.
Remove from the oven and let cool for about 5 minutes before turning it out of the pan to finish cooling on a wire rack.
