Surprise

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?