“WILDERNESS” Anthony Rintalla Cloud shadow flickerfalls up valley rims, curtaining cold on rasping casters from the pit of the loch: the monster is here. It isn’t fear that rises in the glacial dredge, but anticipation rewarded, the peaty clench of a whisky’s melt. Breathing here sends shivers back past the jut-rocks of jaw hinge, plunging hidden waterfalls down the gorge. It is grasped in gasps. It leaves and hollows. This is the bed of myth, the drake’s vault, a vast haunted house, its storm-gabled roof lifting clear past scarred, mossed jags. All the age of the world clawed across these stones, tilling cold into every lost crevasse. The earth eviscerated and laid bare to the scudding sky. We can’t breathe this water, can’t drink this sky; this land makes us young, makes us mortal, made us put a monster here.
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