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?
Copyright Credit: Carrie Fountain, "Surprise" from Instant Winner. Copyright © 2014 by Carrie Fountain. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Source: Instant Winner (Penguin Books, 2014)