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Poetry Friday: “Christmas Morning in a Hotel Room” by Carrie Fountain

Poetry Friday: “Christmas Morning in a Hotel Room” by Carrie Fountain

Last updated on: May 12, 2016 at 1:16 pm by Image

Poetry Friday: “Christmas Morning in a Hotel Room” by Carrie Fountain 2016-05-12T13:16:37-07:00 Image

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Each Friday at Good Letters we feature a poem from the pages of Image, selected and introduced by one of our writers or readers.

Is there any place more melancholy to spend Christmas morning than a hotel room? A place designed to be no place at all? Yet it’s strangely fitting: the mystery of the Incarnation is that it’s precisely nowhere—on the margin of the world—that a God bursts in. In this poem, a narrator stands at a hotel window on Christmas morning, an figure in isolation, and wills herself to believe that “something important / began or ended precisely” in this no-place, some parking lot by some highway. And it’s her simple belief that even the empty places of the world are filled with meaning—“no doubt,” she thinks—that becomes the miracle of this scene, her belief transforming the commonplace world into one where hope rises in billows, where God arrives like a stranger in an idling car, waiting right outside.

—Tyler McCabe

Christmas Morning in a Hotel Room by Carrie Fountain

Out the window, the parking lot
and beyond that, the highway.

No doubt something important
began or ended precisely there, or

there, in that spot where the ice-white
rental car is idling neatly, clouds

of exhaust billowing up like hope,
like the hope of the Christ child, silent

in his mother’s arms, finally silent
after the great yanking commotion

of birth, the donkeys steaming
outside in the moon-cold morning.

Mary, full of grace, her most radiant
and successful self, smelling the baby’s

head, touching his cheek with the back
of her finger. Finally, you’re here.

Because the windshield is fogged,
the stranger’s face is obscured

behind the wheel, though I can see
the back seat is piled high with gifts.

Carrie Fountain’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Tin House. She is the author of two poetry collections, Instant Winner and Burn Lake (both from Penguin). The latter won a 2009 National Poetry Series Award. She is writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.

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