In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

Some aren’t okay with not understanding everything. But I’m not afraid of a world filled with mystery.

I lower the visor against the sinking sun. A ray catches a crack in the windshield and illuminates it, a tiny comet. I’ve always loved when the light finds the broken spots in the world and makes them beautiful.

Ever since I first became aware that the world contains mysteries and incomprehensible wonders, I’ve tried to live as a witness to them.

“Because for every way the world tries to kill us, it gives us a way to survive. You just gotta find it.”

Above us is an immaculate chaos of white stars and drifting moonlit-silver clouds.

Ask me to number the breaths I wish for you. One more. Ask me a thousand times. The

answer will always be one more.

The mossy, metallic fragrance of the river wafts around us in the syrupy humidity, mixing with the flinty scent of wet stone and the yeasty tang of mud.

There are days when your heart is so filled with this world’s beauty, it feels like holding too much of something in your hand. Days that taste like wild honey. This is one of them.

Here we are, survivors of quiet wars. Like trees that have weathered a brutal storm, but with broken branches

and fallen blossoms littering the ground around us.

“Death is frightening and I know how tempting it is to let fear guide our steps.”

“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.”

I guess uncertainty isn’t always something you can conquer. Sometimes it’s a path you have to take.

I’ve seen that life is filled with unimaginable horror. But it’s also threaded through with unimaginable wonder.

This must be what it’s like to die. You look around you and see how much of what you love you leave behind.

“If you could know everyone who’s ever loved you, would you want to know?” I think about my answer for a few moments. Would I? Would it be better to know that someone you never thought loved you did love you? Or would it be worse to know that someone you always thought loved you didn’t?

I’d thought about how funny it would be if when you got to heaven, God could give you a printout with all of your life’s vital statistics. How much hair you produced. How many colds you defeated. How many times you skinned your knees. How many nightmares you endured. How many pancakes you ate. Every brave thing you did. Every heartbreak you overcame. Everyone you mourned. Everyone you ever loved. Everyone who ever loved you.

I smell the lake before I see it, the aroma of mud and composting marsh grasses, carrying on its shoulders the unripe-watermelon-rind scent of water. It reminds me of my river. This is where you can find sanctuary when you need it.

“Nothing’ll break your heart like trying to take a picture of the moon. It’s like, ‘Here, look at this picture I took of a coin in a parking lot.’

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.

“I pay attention, Cash. You can’t be a poet unless you do. And I see in you someone who wants to experience joy and is having a tough time doing that right now. 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.” Tears well in my

I had stolen moments of joy from a hungry world that devours them and protected them for a while in cupped hands.

Still, I’m terrified a day will come when we never hug and make up after a fight. I don’t know what I’ll do if that happens. I have more experience grieving the dead than the living.

Poets look for how the world is sewn together so they can unstitch it and piece it back together in a new way.

afternoon sky is incongruously sorrow gray,

My heart blooms the whole time they speak, my worlds converging in the best possible way.

The sky is a festive tinsel silver, and a brisk, stiff wind forces our hands into our pockets and tinges

our cheeks pink as it rushes between the buildings like it’s late for something.

We think of language as this tame thing that lives in neat garden beds, bound by rules and fences. Then someone shows it to you growing wild and beautiful, flowering vines consuming cities, erasing pavement and lines. Breaking

through any fence that would try to contain it. Reclaiming. Reshaping. Reforming. In my life, I’ve never known anything else that felt so full of infinite possibility. Words make me feel strong. They make me feel powerful and alive. They make me feel like I can open doors.

It’d be a lucky kid who got to grow up with them as parents. It’s a real shitty deal that you get to grow up only once and your parents are your parents and you get one shot at it.

“There’s a word in Portuguese for the feeling I have. Saudade. It doesn’t really have a translation.” “What’s the closest thing?” “Mmm. Maybe ‘the sadness of missing someone or something.’

The low overcast sky reflects back the city lights in a wintry rose-gold glow. It’s one of my favorite colors.

feel like I’ve been running in the pitch dark, and suddenly, there’s no ground under my feet, and the only question as I fall is how badly I’ll be broken when I hit the bottom of whatever chasm I’ve stumbled into. And still I cling to the tiniest scrap of hope, as if I’ll land on a giant feather mattress. Maybe this is her idea of humor.

Where did I ever get the idea I was in her league? My broken life is no place for her. I wonder if all my days will be spent pressing vainly against doors forever shut to me.

If only heartbreak were truly what it claims to be, it might not be so bad. But here’s the thing—your heart never gets broken quite enough to stop wanting who broke it.

She doesn’t let my hand go the rest of the drive. This won’t help my case that I’m not in love with Delaney, but I don’t mind, because without her to hold on to, I would drown in the current of my sadness.

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. And I know how to do that. I have a pen on my nightstand. I grab it. I don’t even get up to find my notebook. I write in the back of Dr. Adkins’s book, the way she once told me she used to do in her favorite poetry books. It pours from me, unbroken. Seeing my words spilling onto the page dulls the keen edge of my misery. Beauty in every wound. Dignity in heartbreak. This is what your mama was looking for—just to stop hurting for a while—and it killed her. As cures for pain go, poetry is better than most.

Dignity dies as the body does.

love you. I’ll always love you,” I whisper again and again to his unconscious ear, hoping he absorbs it somehow. Hoping he takes it with him to whatever unmapped land he’s journeying to. Hoping he returns. If only once more.

While I sleep, he passes into the night of nights, drawing his final breath with no more ceremony than a leaf falling. My heart howls. I don’t know how to live under the sun of a God whose harvest is everyone I love. I don’t know.

Laid out like this, Papaw’s existence was quiet and small, but it was a life defined by the love he gave and got. It was the life he wanted.

No elegy but our tears.

I wish our love was enough to keep whole the people we love.

was late November. A hard rain had come two days prior and brought the biting cold, low pewter skies, and piercing, insistent wind that whistled through the naked branches and drove the leaves hissing across the ground, rattling plastic bags impaled on barbwire fences. The air smelled like wood smoke, damp soil, and the sweet rot of fallen apples. We drove far from town and hunted all day, talking only a little. Mostly basking silently in each other’s company. The light faded as the day wore on, and the sky darkened from the color of a new quarter to the color of a tarnished one.

The crows called out in the twilight. My legs ached and my fingers and toes had long gone stiff and numb with cold, but it was delicious to be in this pure and clean place,

But I was filled instead with a gray and somber silence in every reach of myself. The sort that feels like the last leaf clinging to an autumn-stripped branch looks as it flutters in the wind, waiting to fall. There was nothing for me in stealing another creature’s breath.

Some people can lift your heart up to the light, reading the truth of you written on it. I was afraid that being a man meant waging war on what’s beautiful. I wanted to love the world without taking anything from it. He knew all this. This is what you remember of the people you love when they’re gone—the ways they knew you that no one else did—even you. In that way, their passing is a death of a piece of yourself.