poemoftheweek poemoftheweek.com poemoftheweek.org poem of the week
02-23-2016
Carrie Fountain
In the Distant Past
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.
The visit to the psychic
who told Jon he was just where
he needed to be in life,
then told me I was born
to wait and that if
I demonstrated patience
I would someday be
the instant winner
of a great and luxurious prize,
though what it would be
and when it would come
she could not say. 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.
Nostalgia Says No
Your father is a man with a mustache
and black hair sitting on his haunches
in the sunlight unhooking warm cans of beer
from a six-pack and forcing each
with an easy shove into the white heart
of the ice chest. But no, that was
years ago. Where is the crunching sound
the ice makes? Where is the slow melt
of the passing day, the dead center
of the birthday party, the piñata swaying
heavily overhead? And the now-dead
with their hands folded and their legs
crossed in their lawn chairs, when did they
stand and walk out of the yard, oblivious,
saying, Save me a piece of cake, saying, no
I'll be back, save me a piece of cake.
Is it really that easy? Remind me:
oblivious is a word with no eyes or
Prayer (Rinsed)
By now I feel rinsed
by time, by what
can happen and what can't
happen, rinsed too
by surprise, by the accident
and then the discipline
of love, the body
I've come to, which I am,
even now, leaving behind,
and the mind, the weird
guilt of the passing hour,
the shame of clocks, the way
the day opens its wet, blue
petals then whitens
in the center and falls off
heavily into night, rinsed,
even, by the conversation
I'm having with myself
right now, waiting for the next part
of this sentence, for the next
airplane to pass overhead,
above the city, through
the equanimity of sky, making
that sickening sound of force
and action that is simply
the sound of this prayer
being made and this prayer
being torn apart again.
-from Instant Winner
BIO: Carrie Fountain’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House, and Poetry, among others. Her debut collection, Burn Lake, was a National Poetry Series winner and was published in 2010 by Penguin. Her second collection, Instant Winner, was published by Penguin in 2014. Born and raised in Mesilla, New Mexico, Fountain received her MFA as a fellow at the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently writer-in-residence at St. Edward's University, she lives in Austin with her husband, playwright Kirk Lynn, and their children.
