What I Want and What I Can Have

After dinner, I try to digest
kale and cauliflower in my longing
to live longer, and a root-beer float
in case my world ends tomorrow.

I play the gamble game with exercise
and diet, reminded daily by obituaries
featuring people younger than me:
the impossible becoming likely.

I want to go out full, embraced by my life,
the grand quilt of being here. Yet memories
are remnants, and come one patch at a time.
And like moments, most fade unnoticed.

After a storm, I take a walk.
At the jasmine vine by my front door,
a raindrop, suspended on a stem, stops me.
What I want, what I can have, merge.

From I Got What I Came For, (Penciled In, 2017). Posted with kind permission of the author.

Jeanie Greensfelder

Jeanie Greensfelder is a poet and psychologist. She was honored to serve as San Luis Obispo County’s poet laureate during 2017 and 2018. Author of I Got What I Came For, Marriage and Other Leaps of Faith, and Biting the Apple, her poems have been published at Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry, Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day, Grateful Living, Wise Brain Bulletin, the On Being blog, and multiple anthologies and journals. Through her poetry, she seeks to understand herself and others on this shared journey,  as Joseph Campbell wrote, filled with sorrowful joys and joyful sorrows.

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