Carrie Fountain

I am done smoking cigarettes, done waiting tables, done counting tips at two a.m. in the neon-dark dance hall, done sleeping with young men in my apartment, done facing them or not, thinking of oblivion, which is better than nothing. I am done not wearing underwear because it’s so Victorian. I am done telling men I don’t wear underwear because it’s so Victorian. I am done with the night a guy spread my legs on a pool table, all those balls piled up in the pockets. I am done. I am never going back. When I see that night on the street I will drive past and never even glance over. I am done going to grad school, nodding in your workshop. I am done teaching English as a second language, saying I pointing to my chest, saying you pointing to them. I am done teaching the poetry class where no one talked and no one listened to me and outside the window the cottonwood wagged its sun-white leaves in the breeze as if to say,I give up, I give up. I am done being a childless woman, a childless wife, a woman with no scars on her body. I am done with the wide afternoons of before, the long stare, the tightly closed door. And I am done, too, for the most part, with the daydream of after. I am after for now. I am turning up the heater to see if that will make the baby sleep another fifteen minutes so I can finish this poem. I am done thinking of the past as if it had survived, though sometimes I think of the past and sometimes I see it coming, catching up, hands caked with dried mud, head shaved clean.

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?

Things weren’t very specific when I was in labor, yet everything was there, suddenly: all that my body had known, even things I’d only been reminded of occasionally, as when a stranger’s scent had reminded me of someone I’d known in the distant past. The few men I’d loved but didn’t marry. The time, living alone in Albuquerque, when I fainted in the kitchen one morning before work and woke up on the floor, covered in coffee. Finally. it was coming. It was all moving forward. Finally, it was all going to pass through me. It was beginning to happen and it was all going to happen in one single night. No more lingering in the adolescent pools of memory, no more giving it a little more time to see if things would get better or worse. No more moving from one place to the next. Finally, my body was all that had ever been given to me, it was all I had, and I sweated through it in layers, so that when, in the end, I was finally standing outside myself and watching, I could see that what brought me into the world was pulling you into the world, and I could see that my body was giving you up and giving you to me, and where in my body there were talents, there were talents, and where there were no talents, there would be scars.

All the baby knows is the flop of her limbs and the milky blue vein of sleep and the parking lot of her animal fear, the cars left there overnight, windshields dark and thick with dew. The rest is completely unknown, the complete darkness of her white room, where she sleeps on a clean sheet printed with baby crocodiles and lions wearing diapers.

Now I know that I’ve never described anything, not one single thing, not the flesh of the avocado which darkens so quickly, though if you scrape what’s been exposed to the air it’s new-green beneath like nothing ever happened. I want to describe this evening, though it’s not spectacular. The baby babbling in the other room over the din and whistle of a football game, and now the dog just outside the door, scratching, rattling the tags on her collar, the car going by, far away but loud, a car without a muffler, and the sound of the baby returning again, pleasure and weight. I want to describe the baby. I want to describe the baby for many hours to anyone who wishes to hear me. My feelings for her take me so far inside myself I can see the pure holiness in motherhood, and it makes me burn with success and fear, the hole her coming has left open, widening. Last night we fed her some of the avocado I’ve just finished eating while writing this poem. Her first food. I thought my heart might burst, knowing she would no longer be made entirely of me, flesh of my flesh. Startled in her amusing way by the idea of eating, she tried to take it in, but her mouth pushed it out. And my heart did burst.

For Burn Construction Company When you were building the i -10 bypass, one of   your dozers, moving earth at the center of a great pit, slipped its thick blade beneath the water table, slicing into the earth’s wet palm, and the silt moistened beneath the huge thing’s tires, and the crew was sent home for the day. Next morning, water filled the pit. Nothing anyone could do to stop it coming. It was a revelation: kidney-shaped, deep green, there between the interstate and the sewage treatment plant. When nothing else worked, you called it a lake and opened it to the public. And we were the public.