Sentimental

The light has traveled unthinkable thousands of miles to be condensed, recharged, and poured off the white white pages of an open Bible the country parson holds in front of this couple in a field, in July, in the sap and the flyswirl of July in upper Wisconsin, where their vows buzz in a ring in the air like the flies, and are as sweet as the sap, in these rich and ritual minutes. Is it sentimental? Oops. And out of that Bible the light continues to rush as if from a faucet. There will be a piecrust cooling out of its own few x’ed-out cuts. And will it make us run for the picklier taste of irony rolled around protectively on our tongues like a grab of Greek olives? My students and I discuss this slippery phenomenon. Does “context” matter? Does “earned” count? If a balled-up fidget of snakes in the underbrush dies in a freeze is it sentimental? No, yes, maybe. What if a litter of cocker spaniels? What if we called them “puppydogs” in the same poem in that same hard, hammering winter? When my father was buried, the gray snow in the cemetery was sheet tin. If I said that? Yes, no, what does “tone” or “history” do to the Hollywood hack violinists who patiently wait to play the taut nerves of the closest human body until from that lush cue alone, the eyes swell moistly, and the griefs we warehouse daily take advantage of this thinning of our systems, then the first sloppy gushes begin . . . Is that “wrong”? Did I tell you the breaths of the gravediggers puffed out like factorysmoke as they bent and straightened, bent and straightened, mechanically? Are wise old (toothless) Black blues singers sentimental?—“gran’ma”? “country cookin’”? But they have their validity, don't they, yes? their sweat-in-the-creases, picking up the lighting in a fine-lined mesh of what it means to have gone through time alive a little bit on this planet. Hands shoot up . . . opinions . . . questions . . . What if the sun wept? the moon? Why, in the face of those open faces, are we so squeamish? Call out the crippled girl and her only friend the up-for-sale foal, and let her tootle her woeful pennywhistle musics. What if some chichi streetwise junkass from the demimonde gave forth with the story of orphans forced through howling storm to the workhouse, letting it swing between the icy-blue quotation marks of cynicism—then? What if I wept? What if I simply put the page down, rocked my head in my own folded elbows, forgot the rest of it all, and wept? What if I stepped into the light of that page, a burnished and uncompromising light, and walked back up to his stone a final time, just that, no drama, and it was so cold, and the air was so brittle, metal buckled out song like a bandsaw, and there, from inside me, where they’d been lost in shame and sophistry all these years now, every last one of my childhood’s heartwormed puppydogs found its natural voice.