Wilderness
41
hawk-eyed hankering men...here are the blond and blue-eyed women...here they hide curled asleep waiting...ready to snarl and kill...ready to sing and give milk...waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.
There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird...and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want...and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.
O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.
