In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

There are still many long and loss-haunted days. Times I feel like giving up. Moments when grief strikes suddenly, like a rattlesnake hidden in tall grass. I see his face every day. His absence is so tangible it has its own body. But the world is filled with new green, and it reminds me that there are beautiful things that continue on.

You pass through enough defeat, it feels like you’ll never taste victory’s sweetness. But then somehow you do, and for at least that moment, you can’t even remember a time when it wasn’t on your lips.

She hugs me hard and deep—the kind of hug when you’re trying to get past muscle and bone to hug someone’s soul.

“I’ll tell you the truest thing I know: You are not a creature of grief. You are not a congregation of wounds. You are not the sum of your losses. Your skin is not your scars. Your life is yours, and it can be new and wondrous. Remember that.”

Every wound, every hurt that brought us together—I regret none of it.

The rocker on the other side of me—Papaw’s favorite—sits still and silent. A vast and lonesome emptiness. One that will ache as long as I can feel. But I’m healing.

I once thought of memory as a tether. I still do, in a way. But now I also see memory as the roots from which you grow toward the sun. The dreams of closed doors still come, but less now. I sit with my notebook and pen in the wild light of the day’s end.

In the Wild Light (Elegy for Phillip Earl Pruitt) You were there when my life felt like I was trying to stop a falling axe with my hands, every time I dreamed of rows of doors like teeth in a death-clenched jaw You spoke “tree” and “wind” to me for the first time, as if whispering God’s secret name in my ear This world is knives and wolves but also swans and stars; you taught me that Once, in August, before you had to beg the air for breath, I watched a hawk descend on a field and fly back into the yawning blue with talons empty I marveled at a creature that could fall without being fallen and still rise clutching such emptiness and hunger To learn of loss is only to know it a little and not to become armored against its fearsome edge The sun is setting now as I write this in the first season of your absence And I see you in the wild light; I hear you whisper “tree” and “wind” to me in the wild light