I don’t want to teach anymore lessons to anyone, lessons I haven’t
learned or lessons I have learned. I want to keep my lessons inside me.
I want to rise early and take my lessons for a walk in the brisk morning air
in a different state. I want to show them the mountains of my youth,
to be turned off by them at first but then marry them a few years later
in a simple ceremony surrounded by friends and family. Need this? I keep
writing in the margin of your poem. More? I keep asking your essay
about pollution, as if More? is a question your essay about pollution
can answer. Where the hell do I get off, anyway? Always with the better
idea, the advice, the pointing across a room to whatever it is I think
you need to be looking at.
Carrie Fountain’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Crazyhorse, and Tin House. Her first collection, Burn Lake, was selected by poet Natasha Trethewey as a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series Award and was published in 2010 by Penguin. She teaches at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, where she lives with her husband, the playwright Kirk Lynn, and their children.