Thoreau and the Wild Grapes
- Thoreau and the Wild Grapes
Whenever he saw the broad, blunt, star-shaped leaves and coiled tendrils tangled among, across, and deep in their arbor in a thicket of alders, at the end of summer, he would take off his hat, crouch down, and slowly force his way in and wriggle through that curtain in a kind of ferment, till he could see the pendulous, dark-blue, deep-red, and light-green bunches overhead. He would brace his legs, hunch, half straighten, and then climb the hardened joints of branches and, crook-elbowed and crook-wristed, guide his fingers carefully to a harvest not even raccoons or crows or jays had found out how to gather and would break the stems and let the clusters fall against his shoulder, glance aside, and joggle by to the ground. He would shake the old, gnarled mother-vine and bring a rattle like grapeshot from the bunches out of reach, leaving the rest to heaven, then carry home a canvas bag of them and his hat, chock full, and his sober self, nodding at sour neighbors. [End Page 170]
David Wagoner has published twenty books of poems, most recently After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola; his play First Class was performed at A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle. He has won numerous awards from Poetry and Prairie Schooner, as well as the Lilly Prize and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years and edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington.
