You can't have it all (or, gather ye sneakers while ye may...)

On the last stretch of a multi-leg road trip I stopped in at a used book store housed in an actual barn on the road between Lancaster and home, despite the fact that I had made not one, but two trips to the used bookstore in town in the previous 72 hours and there were several bags in the trunk of the car that carried a bit of laundry and several pounds of books, some still waiting to be read.

There are times when I practice the speech I’d give to the folks from Child Protection Services when they ask me why household money went to volumes of poetry, comics anthologies, and cookbooks instead of to keeping the kids shod and fed. Truth be told, what I’ve spent in second hand books comes out, almost to the penny, to two pairs of new kids’ sneakers at the buy one, get one half off sale, which itself is reminding me of Liz Windover’s poetry cycle that revolved around memorable pairs of sneakers, so perhaps the trip to the Sketchers outlet was in fact seeding the ground for poetic revelations.

At the bookstore on Strasburg Pike, you set off the electric eye when you open the bottom half of the dutch door; as you try to figure out the layout of the place, a woman with kind eyes swings by to tell you “he’ll be out here in a minute,” and you begin to hope that you will find something that you actually want to take home with you since you’ve probably roused the proprietor from his early afternoon nap to make a special trip out to tend the shop. If you read mostly contemporary stuff, this may cause particular anxiety because most of the volumes on the dusty shelves have something to do with military history, or were published around the turn of the last century – the poetry section is very heavy on the names that have been assigned to the streets in the subdivision next to my folks’ development: Whittier, Longfellow, Tennyson.

Tennyson has been surfacing in unexpected ways: Patti Digh writes about finding her copy of “In Memoriam” which she read shortly after her father’s death and seeing her marginalia as a trace of her spirit and state of mind at the time. More prosaically, the poet is namechecked in an animated cartoon my son is obsessed with right now about a kid who can turn himself into mutant alien animals with the aid of a wrist watch; he wore his Ben Ten(nyson) sneakers to shreds over the schoolyear.

Amidst the shelves of 19th century volumes were several collections by contemporary poets, conspicuously slender, tall, and dustjacketed, like volunteers from the Ardmore Junior League Thrift shop crashing the local Assembly of God jumble sale. Someone has offloaded their collections of Garrett Hongo, Li Young Lee, and Alison Hawthorne Deming and I almost picked up Deming’s Science and Other Poems because I like it so much, and was trying to think of to whom I could give it; then I saw Barbara Ras’ Bite Every Sorrow. The cover image is a painting by Robin Eschner entitled Sallie Always Wondered Whether She Was Adopted. Here’s the opening to the opening poem:

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.