It's Not Having What You Want
I was pretty obsessed back in the day with the album The Very Best of Sheryl Crow It was in heavy rotation in my household when it came out, and recently is again! 2003 is when it arrived — how can that even be?? What I love is that both my daughter, who is another city, and I are right back into it. (She would have been five years old in ‘03).
One of the epigraphs to my book Red Velvet Forest (which was also my creative thesis for my MA in English) is even the line by Crow, “It’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.” Probably from one of the best songs ever — Soak Up the Sun. And this is going to sound pretentious, but I think I came to these lyrics then first, via a book titled The Essential Mystics, which quoted Rabban Gamliel: “Desire only that which has already been given. Want only that which you already have.” I mean, a lot of people have said similar things, it’s all good right? I don’t own the book any more, but the vibe is out there in the universe. And Sheryl Crow is still the best.
My advice to everyone this summer has been to enjoy summer, enjoy what you’ve got, soak up the sun. Especially if you live at latitude 53 which is where I am, because we all know how sparse the sun is at other times of the year. I know very few people who haven’t had a rough time this past year. A lot of stuff has just really sucked. I recently had a really big laugh when I backed my car into a pole after a particularly not great day where I guess I was having what we will call “a moment.” It’s fine. But who can afford to fix things these days? I need therapy from my therapy but who can afford that either? Other stuff currently is a priority. So like regular people, I just get my therapy from books and poetry and from playing Sheryl Crow and Bruce Springsteen extremely loud in my now banged up car. I’m good, you know?
What I love is when you receive a message, like in Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun,” and then you start hearing similar messages, or maybe sidelong ones, or adjacent ones. So, now you’re on a frequency…and how can you NOT tune in??
So let me share some of what has been coming to me on the airwaves, the poetry-waves. It’s all about wanting….
What We Want
by Linda Pastan
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.
What Do Women Want
I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.
The Light
Isn’t it the work of those of us who work to make new tools
with the tools we are given, hammering matter
into matter more adapted to the hand than to the memory
of a hand, less to the past than to the path to what comes next?
And isn’t it the work of the next adaptation in part to evince
specifically by being what it is, regardless of detail and whether it
wants to or not, the matter of persistence through change,
the hammering of being into time, which is itself the work?
And so it was I took myself downriver, early in the midst
of the worldwide sickness, the light on me knowledgeable
as all light is knowledgeable, silent archive
of everything that happens—it puts you in your place, the light
put me in my place. Light on the surface of East River in March,
light July through October, light at noon on slopes of undulations
pearling for a moment till it gleams up on the peaks, the light
like melon ribbon, light dribbling from the mouth of a mythical
beast like Blake’s dragon, but in effect, closer to a nebulous
walrus made of fire. I am the nebulous walrus made of fire. I walk
among you unrecognized but laughing. There is so much beauty
left to see in this world. And I became what I am now to see it.
It’s not the worst thing to make what you can with what you’ve got. It’s perhaps a good time to ask yourself what you really want. But, too, let’s soak up the sun. I’ve been holding the things I used to want up to the stuff I want now. It’s not all that different, but I’m seeing things differently because I’m not quite who I was. Which also isn’t all bad.
As Donnelly says at the end of his poem, “there is so much beauty left to see in this world.” And I want to see as much of it as I can while I still can.