Thistle Wins

FROM THE INTRODUCTION Once all wilderness was innocence. Later, all wilderness was sin. What does it say about wilderness, that it could be both sin and innocence-a space of condemnation and reprieve-at once? What does it say about us, limber interpreters of vastness? Every day someone takes a snapshot of themselves with the Statue of Liberty on his shoulder, or the moon upheld in her palm, the violent grandeur of the universe turned by metaphor and pixel-flash into a...
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FROM THE INTRODUCTION

Once all wilderness was innocence. Later, all wilderness was sin. What does it say about wilderness, that it could be both sin and innocence-a space of condemnation and reprieve-at once? What does it say about us, limber interpreters of vastness? Every day someone takes a snapshot of themselves with the Statue of Liberty on his shoulder, or the moon upheld in her palm, the violent grandeur of the universe turned by metaphor and pixel-flash into a beachball.

Now we find our wildness in suburban glimpses: long weekends away to a campsite, the unwonted sting of a bee. Yet we were made by wildness; we were wolves before we mellowed to dogs.

DIMWELTER

In the dimwelter of evening we met for a swim.

The gawp of the lake aping the moon's smooth light
Took our floating bodies with a silver swallow
As we swept our smiles filling with pushed water
Into easy depths, trailing wings behind us as we
Paddled and lunged, our hair returned to womb-wet,
Your elbows now and then vivid with drips as a gutter
Overpoured in storm and wind, the cold clean of it
Cutting me into pure halves like a new pear,
A pool of oblong moving shadow now, circling
Wordless when dim clouds came obscuring
The moonbolt riveted so brightly above us-

The stars coming singly clear when we stopped.