as do your children, as does your husband.
It’s strange even now to understand that
you are a mother and a wife, that these gifts
were given to you and that you received them,
fond as you’ve always been of declining
invitations. You belong to the world. The hands
that put a peach tree into the earth exactly
where the last one died in the freeze belong
to the world and will someday feed it again,
differently, your body will become food again
for something, just as it did so humorously
when you became a mother, hungry beings
clamoring at your breast, born as they’d been
with the bodily passion for survival that is
our kind’s one common feature. You belong
to the world, animal. Deal with it. Even as
the great abstractions come to take you away,
the regrets, the distractions, you can at any second
come back to the world to which you belong,
the world you never left, won’t ever leave, cells
forever, forever going through their changes,
as they have been since you were less than
anything, simple information born inside
your own mother’s newborn body, itself made
from the stuff your grandmother carried within hers
when at twelve she packed her belongings
and left the Scottish island she’d known—all
she’d ever known—on a ship bound for Ellis Island,
carrying within her your mother, you, the great
human future that dwells now inside the bodies
of your children, the young, who, like you,
belong to the world.
I’m not quite sure what it is about this poem, but I keep reading and reading it again for the comfort I find in the unequivocal reassurance Fountain offers us. Beginning with the title as the first line, she tells us simply you belong to the world. Regardless of whether you are a mother or a wife, she is clear that these gifts / were given to you and that you received them. With the reference to the peach tree, I hear a link between the earth and the body, your body will become food again / for something. We are rooted, grounded in the earth and in the world.
You belong to the world, animal. Deal with it. So direct and certain – you belong no matter if you believe it or not, the world you never left, won’t ever leave, cells / forever. And then she tells the story you may have heard before, how your cells were inside your mother’s body while she was still cells, simple information, inside her mother’s body. The story of the grandmother who left her Scottish Island, all / she’d ever known, to come to a new country, this ancestral link that connects us to the past as well as the present and even the future.
This grandmother, carrying the great / human future that dwells now inside the bodies / of your children – can you feel the bloodline of human beings, how we are here because we belong here. We are of the world, connected to the earth the way the peach tree was put into the earth to grow and flourish there. And doesn’t it all belong? This endless succession of kinship that makes up this world, each of us with our own place, our relationship to the earth, to the world. I am left with this certainty: You belong to the world.