In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

“Now, more than ever, is the time to turn to poetry. It doesn’t demand that you fix anything or come to any conclusions. It only asks you to observe and sit with what you feel. And with grief, there are no fixes. No conclusions. We can only sit with it.”

But I’m not the biblical literalist a lot of people are. Like, I don’t believe in hell really.”

“Because I’m not sure the human brain is designed to exist for two hundred years. Life expectancy used to be in the thirties or forties. We’ve already more than doubled that. I don’t know if our minds have caught up.” “Like Alzheimer’s and stuff?” “Not even that. You can live a real long life and have a healthy brain. I’m talking about just getting tired. Seeing people you love die. Watching people be terrible to each other. The world leaving you behind. Stuff ending. I don’t know.”

She’s slowly leaving me behind in my mourning. Not intentionally, but still. I can’t tell you how exactly I know that—I just sense it. We journeyed together through the wasteland for a time and it was a small comfort, but that couldn’t last. Nothing does, really. And I don’t know how I’ll manage to stay here alone in this.

We’re quiet for a while, listening to each other breathe. There’s relief in hearing someone you love still breathing.

There’s only the slow trickle of grief eroding me down to nothing. At 5:32 that night, the last of me crumbles.

I

just need to acknowledge the surrender of my spirit, the failure of my courage. The grief’s won. If I’m going to hurt all the time, I’m going to do it around my river and Mamaw. I’m going to withdraw into myself.

She’ll try to talk me into returning, but my sorrow is enough to grind down both our wills.

think maybe my love for my friends and Dr. Adkins is enough, with the help of poetry, to lift me up and carry me to some temperate shore, to quell the insistent, grinding ache and let me continue here. Then the clouds bury the sun again.

This is when I realize I’m not alone. This is when I realize I don’t have to leave them. I don’t have to walk away from some of the greatest richness my life has ever held. I can choose them. I can choose to stay.

But I’m ready to try to patch the holes in my life with courage.

pull her to me and kiss her—it’s long, deep, hungry, delirious, and somehow both heavy and light with every hour we’ve spent together looking at stars or the lights of our town, every moment we’ve spent drifting quietly downriver together, every time we’ve gone to sleep knowing the other was there somewhere for us. This is so much more than the first time we kissed. We are so much more.

There are secret fires you wall off because you fear what they’ll burn if you loose them. Because you choose caution over possibility. But at the first crack in the wall, you feel their warmth and decide you’ll gladly risk the burning.

“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 have it and I’ve always seen it.”

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. Delaney and I keep our back-to-back appointments visiting Dr. Hannan. Delaney’s thumbs start to heal, and so do I. I keep writing through the tempests of pain. That helps a lot too.

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.

Like the waves lapping at my ankles, a swell of grief suddenly rises and breaks

over me. “I feel saudade for my papaw right now,” I say. “Did I say that right?” “Perfect.” “I wish he could see me here.” “Maybe he can.” I think about how we laid Papaw to rest in a river, and all rivers eventually funnel to the sea, and all the seas are connected, so maybe he is here with me.

We’ve arrived at a good place in our friendship.

Because this sacred and memoryless place seems a worthy location for unburdening.

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.

Her gray eyes—now I know them to be the color of the ocean on the cusp of summer—see me. “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.”

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.

I’ll always love her. Every wound, every hurt that brought us together—I regret none of it.

Insects buzz in the sultry June dusk. Fireflies have begun their torchlit conversation. The air is rich with clover and honeysuckle, the smell of earth and grass remembering the sun’s heat, the smoke of a cookout.

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 place where I learned the names of trees and wind, I write.