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John Lent
No doubt the Indians came here not only for water but also, from time to time, to camp and hunt. For the Indians this was not a remote hideaway in a wilderness but an extension of their home; for them the wilderness was home.
—Edward Abbey
“A Walk in the Desert Hills”
Cafeterias in hospitals, in Malls sometimes, though the
ones in Malls tend to be called things like Food Courts or
Towne Centre or Village Greene, funny if you think about
those names for a while. But the thing is I have these
voices in my blood that hoped for me sitting here,
dreamed that by leaving land behind, for-
saking it even, in two or three hundred years his or
her descendants might have the freedom to
live out this wilderness, here, the one you
can’t see, the one that keeps me so
stumped in its contours and
blinds and cul-de-sacs, but
opens up for miles and simply
miles of the thick, green,
moist confusion, another
kind of everything.
Another kind of.
And I accept this rootlessness and a
longing that will not retreat and
gnaws at all the edges of my
movement and sideways glances,
as difficult as it might be, I accept
this shifting, crazy balancing
act in the names of that blood
who dreamed me here.
And the vertigo? A good thing in
many ways, to be constantly off-
balance, humbled by these textures
and this light, this wild neon forest,
tangled garden of intersections
I find myself caught in suddenly,
when I stare out and in at ex-
actly the same time and feel it
finally, and I arrive feet flat on
the gravel, nose in the
pines, eyes on the blue
blue, blue lungs heaving
in then out, showing up
here at dusk say,
Burning.
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