In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

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.

“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.”

Carry off my fear like it’s sin. Fill my reservoir of courage. Cleanse me of doubt. Make me strong enough to cut myself a path through the world, like you. Remind me that there are things I love that can last.

Fear tells you to make your life small. Don’t give it the air to survive.

“You can’t fix a car with poetry. Poetry won’t help you build that new app and make billions. It won’t win you an election. There are so many ways that poetry isn’t useful in the way we think of things as being useful. And yet…” The corners of her mouth turn up in the faintest smile. “We bring poems to read at weddings and funerals. We write them to lovers. When our lives have been burned down around us, we look for that single glowing ember remaining, and that’s a poem. Poetry is one of the highest artistic achievements of humankind.

“I told you that there are many things that poetry won’t do. But there are many things poetry will do. Poetry makes arguments. It presents cases for better ways of living and seeing the world and those around us. It heals wounds. It opens our eyes to wonder and ugliness and beauty and brutality. Poetry can be the one light that lasts the night. The warmth that survives the winter. The harvest that survives the long drought. The love that survives death. The things poetry can do are far more important than the things it can’t.”

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.”

By the time I’m done reading at least one poem out of each book (usually more), I’m experiencing a deep calm, like I feel after being on a river, under the sun, in the wind, feeling the spray off my paddle. For those brief moments strolling through the forest of words, everything had disappeared.

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

“Every hurt, every sorrow, every scar has brought you here. Poetry lets us turn pain into fire by which to warm ourselves. Go build a fire.”

Sometimes you don’t even realize you are ravenous until you start eating. Dr. Adkins’s story has identified that feeling I get when I read and write poetry: satiety. I didn’t know to call it a hunger until now.

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.

Sometimes you get used to hurting, the way you acclimate to excessively cold or hot water, and then it’s the absence of it you notice.

As the hours creep by, I sit at his side, listening to him breathe, trying to build a store of his presence—like an animal hiding away food for a long season of hunger.

Dignity dies as the body does.

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.

He didn’t want a funeral. Aunt Betsy has an idea for what to do instead. Something called a Goodbye Day. We spend a day doing all of Papaw’s favorite things. The things we would have done with him if he’d been healthy enough to do them on his last day.

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.

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.

“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.”

Turns out it’s like the people you love are riding a teeter-totter across from you. And when they’re gone, you plummet down and have a hard time getting back up. You never reach the heights you used to.

This is a completely different experience from when my mama died. I guess you don’t get good at mourning. There are no grieving muscles you can train. You start over each time.

I’m realizing that every triumph, large and small, that I have from now until the day I die will be diminished, if only a little, by my inability to share it with him.

Now that I think a lot on words, I realize how poorly they represent absence. 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. Instead, we have: Dead Deceased Departed Disappeared Done Ended Expired Finished Gone Left Lost Passed Not one expresses the completeness of the idea it represents, the way apple represents the completeness of an apple and river represents the completeness of a river. They all leave something unsaid. They all have some phantom limb that reminds you of their lack. Don’t they know how much I loved him?

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