[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.