Wilderness

by Carl Sandburg

There is a wolf in me...fangs pointed for tearing gashes...a red tongue for raw meat...
and the hot lapping of blood-I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the
wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me...a silver-gray fox...I sniff and guess...I pick things out of the wind
and air...I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers...I
circle and loop and double-cross.

There is 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 will not let it go.

There is a fish in me...I know I came from saltblue water-gates...I scurried with shoals of
herring...I blew waterspouts with porpoises...before land was...before the water went
down...before Noah...before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me...clambering-clawed...dog-faced...yawping in a galoot's hunger
...hairy under the armpits...here are the 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.