In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

“You’ll never regret a decision more than the one you make out of fear. Fear tells you to make your life small. Fear tells you to think small. Fear tells you to be small-hearted. Fear seeks to preserve itself, and the bigger you let your life and perspective and heart get, the less air you give fear to survive.”

Memory is a tether. Sometimes you get some slack in the line and you can play it out for a while. You forget and think you’re free. But you’ll always get to the end and realize it’s still there, binding you, reminding you of itself, reminding you that you belong to each other.

nothing I say in this class is as important as watching leaves fall.

Life often won’t freely give you moments of joy. Sometimes you have to wrench them away and cup them in your hands, to protect them from the wind and rain. Art is a pair of cupped hands. Poetry is a pair of cupped hands.”

“These are a thousand times better than Red Delicious apples,” Alex says. “ ‘Red Delicious’ is half a lie.”

Her poems massage the hurt from my heart—not by asking me to avoid it, but by asking me to sit with it and to speak with it—to know it.

We should have a language of loss that we keep in a black-velvet-lined box and only get out when we most need it.

I hold every memory of him like a match I let burn down to the end, singeing my fingers until it hurts too much to hold.

No doubt I’ll miss them so badly that when they visit me in my memory, it’ll double me over, knocking the wind out of me.

“Being a poet takes bravery. Yes, the courage to bleed on a page. But also to bleed for the world we write poetry about.

You can feel when your mind’s building a palace for a memory. A place it lives, glowing and dancing in marble halls. A place you can visit when you need to feel less of the world’s gravity.