Carrie Fountain is an American poet and writer of young adult fiction. She served as 2019 Poet Laureate of Texas.
SURPRISE
Carrie Fountain
I don’t want to teach you anything
or show you my wound or have you taste
the amazing thing I made this morning
with only what we had left in the fridge
before you came home with new groceries.
I’m as tired as you are of genius. Hey,
do you know where we put the sky?
I haven’t seen it for months.
When I was in New Mexico last week
all I did was push the baby in her stroller
and worry about the sun on her legs
and think about coming home. Now
I’m home and I’m thinking of the way
the light came in off the runway
while I was waiting in the airport
for the return flight, feeding the baby
a hundred Cheerios, one by one, thinking,
I don’t even know how to visit New Mexico
anymore, thinking, I guess there isn’t going to be
a time when I live like I lived that summer
in Santa Fe, that summer-into-fall
I’ve for so long told myself I will someday
return to, that place I’ve kept, that ace
in the hole, that life with mornings
and afternoons that I am still holding back
with the very tip of my fingernail. After all,
this afternoon is the afternoon I’ve been
waiting for all my life: running
the vacuum over the rugs while you walk
the baby around the block and my breasts
heat and tingle as they fill again with milk
and someone with the wrong number
calls my cell again and again, refusing
to take there is no Phillip here for an answer.
This is, after all, the exact life I take with me
to bed each night, digging deeper and deeper
into its blood-dark soil, waking some mornings
from dreams that shake me and leave me
with a thirst for the past or the future,
a distance I can never reach—dreams
of a house I don’t recognize but know
I have lived in all my life, someone
I’ve never seen saying, Reach under
your shoulder blade and feel with your fingers
the place where I pierced you. Oh,
that summer: Why did I have to leave it
cracked open behind me as I went? How
did I even do that? How did I get that
one sky to stay wedged there, blue as the sky
and just as big?
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TIME TO BE THE FINE LINE OF LIGHT
Carrie Fountain
between the blind and the sill, nothing
really. There are so many things
that destroy. To think solely of them
is as foolish and expedient as not
thinking of them at all. All I want
is to be the river though I return
again and again to the clouds.
All I want is to stop beginning sentences
with All I want. No—no really all
I want is this morning: my daughter
and my son saying “Da!” back and forth
over breakfast, cracking each other up
while eating peanut butter toast
and raspberries, making a place for
the two of them I will, eventually,
no longer be allowed to enter. Time to be
the fine line. Time to practice being
the line. And then maybe the darkness.
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YOU BELONG TO THE WORLD
Carrie Fountain
as do your children, as does your husband.
It’s strange even now to understand that
you are a mother and a wife, that these gifts
were given to you and that you received them,
fond as you’ve always been of declining
invitations. You belong to the world. The hands
that put a peach tree into the earth exactly
where the last one died in the freeze belong
to the world and will someday feed it again,
differently, your body will become food again
for something, just as it did so humorously
when you became a mother, hungry beings
clamoring at your breast, born as they’d been
with the bodily passion for survival that is
our kind’s one common feature. You belong
to the world, animal. Deal with it. Even as
the great abstractions come to take you away,
the regrets, the distractions, you can at any second
come back to the world to which you belong,
the world you never left, won’t ever leave, cells
forever, forever going through their changes,
as they have been since you were less than
anything, simple information born inside
your own mother’s newborn body, itself made
from the stuff your grandmother carried within hers
when at twelve she packed her belongings
and left the Scottish island she’d known—all
she’d ever known—on a ship bound for Ellis Island,
carrying within her your mother, you, the great
human future that dwells now inside the bodies
of your children, the young, who, like you,
belong to the world.