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Callaloo 26.3 (2003) 594



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Wilderness

Anthony Butts


Lamp lights reflecting off the lacquered street, wet beyond expectancy
or tolerance, leaflets cart wheeling from the grasp of the coffeehouse
attendant—Kenya and Columbia staining her apron: the wilderness

is almost fully behind me. The infant moment now at an end. When the wind
upended daffodils, they were recaptured as dollops of sunlight. As birches went
weeping in the October frost, the air was a husk cocooning. Art was not

an option, the gaze catastrophically focused on what the memory keeps forbidden,
until looking away became a movement all its own. White webs, thick and sticky,
weighing down forearms; corridors which only lead to more corridors; the body

spinning endlessly like a fallen jack: dreams only seem surreal. When did this walk
become a journey? Headlights approaching, voices huddled against the silence,
neon signs protesting passersby, the world can be caustic if we let it.

It's all we have to be thankful for, the idea of perfection as a jellyfish
surviving eons without the need to evolve. The deep blue sea is not the place
for mankind, children kicking as if still in the womb—the fluid seemingly amniotic,

stinging anemones more like plants than like animals with wills all their own.
Walk for a long time without wondering where you are. Walk until the trees seem
to reach down. We cannot return to the places of childhood, the stove

that really is hot to the touch, the spider waiting to zap us newly with emotion,
the forest more real, more relevant, as we awaken, as we rise from the bramble.



 

Anthony Butts is a member of the creative writing faculty of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the author of Fifth Season (1997) and Little Low Heaven (2003). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

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