THE WILDNERNESS
There’s a wolf in me—
Fangs pointed for tearing gashes,
and a red tongue for raw meat
and the hot lapping of blood,
And I keep this wolf
because the wilderness gave it to me,
and the wilderness won’t let it go.
There’s a fox in me
a silvery gray fox that sniffs,
and guesses, and picks things
out of the wind and the air—
A nose in the dark night
that takes sleepers and eats them
and hides the feathers—
that circles and loops
and double crosses.
There’s a hog in me—
a snout and a belly,
a machinery for eating and grunting,
a machinery for sleeping
satisfied in the sun.
I got this too from the wilderness,
and the wilderness won’t let it go.
There’s a fish in me.
I know I came from the salt blue water gates.
I scurried with the shoals of the herring.
I blew water spouts with the porpoises—
before land was, before the water went down,
before Noah, before the first chapter of Genesis.
And there’s a baboon in me—
A clamoring claw—a dogfaced, yawping,
galooting hunger—a hairy under the armpits.
Here are the hawkeyed hankering men
Here are the blond and blue eyed women
Here they hide curled in sleep, waiting,
Ready to snarl, ready to sing, ready to give milk, waiting.
And I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.
And there’s an eagle in me, and a mocking bird.
And the eagle flies among the rocky mountains of my dreams
and fights among the sierra crags for what I want.
And the mocking bird warbles in the early forenoon
before the dew is gone from the leaves
and warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope
and gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes.
And I got the eagle,
and I got the mockingbird,
and I got ‘em from the wilderness.
Yeah it’s a zoo in me.
I got a menagerie inside my ribs—
under my bony head
and under the red valves of my heart.
And I got something else, too—
It’s a man child heart in there—
It’s a woman child heart in there—
It’s a father and a mother
and a lover.
It came from God knows where,
And it’s going to God knows where.
And I’m the keeper of that zoo.
And so I say yes, and I say no.
And I sing, and I kill,
and I work.
And I’m a friend to the world.
And I came from the wilderness.
—CARL SANDBURG