The wasps outside the kitchen window are making that thick, unraveling sound again, floating in and out of the bald head of their nest, seeming not to move while moving, and it has just occurred to me, standing, washing the coffeepot, watching them hang loosely in the air—thin wings; thick, elongated abdomens; sad, down— pointing antennae— that this is the heart’s constant project: this simple learning; learning how to hold hopelessness and hope together; to see on the unharmed surface of one the great scar of the other; to recognize both and to make something of both; to desire everything and nothing at once and to desire it all the time; and to contain that desire fleshly, in a body; to wash it and rest it and feed it; to learn its name and from whence it came; and to speak to it—oh, most of all to speak to it— every day, every day, saying to one part, “Well, maybe this is all you get,” while saying to the other, “Go on, break it open, let it go.”
I became an insta fan of Carrie Fountain’s poetry when I stumbled upon the poem “The Jungle” last month in the American Poetry Review (Vol 49, No2). I almost picked “The Jungle” for Poem-a-Day, but “Want,” written in 2010, seems apropos this April, as we are suspended together “floating in and out” of uncertainty like Fountain’s sad, busy wasps. We can brace for the unknown suffering coming our way, yet work from our bald headed nests, start seeds indoors, cook big meals for families reunited by COVID19, watch Tiger King on Netflix, go through with weddings or postpone them until next year. We skeptically conjure futures based on the imaginary ones we envisioned in the obsolete past. We do not know how to tweak our own fantasies so that we can believe them fully, but we keep going. “Want” offers an aspirational strategy for navigating life’s unpredictability. “Learning” as fountain writes, “how to hold hopelessness and hope together.”
