Poetry

Wanting It All

 [at the Old Depot Restaurant, the menu 

 offers a “You Get It All” garden salad]

 

How can I not want that, I wonder, 

recalling how my first wife 

would warn, “you can’t have it all,  

you’re chasing rainbows, you know, 

nobody can have it all.”

 

And now this menu–

only, as I read the description, 

I wonder if perhaps I could get it all, 

but without the anchovies 

and jalapeno peppers, and then 

I begin to wonder what that might mean:                 

 

Wanting it all, I think, 

wanting it all–

that’s one thing, but aren’t there always 

anchovies and jalapeno peppers? 

And, I think, if I really understood that 

I might have an answer for my first wife, 

 

though we’re long since parted, 

and I still want it all                  

 

like Adam and Eve, there in the garden, 

naked and hungry before the fall.

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