Is sentiment a bad thing in writing? To be avoided, like incomplete sentences or beginning a sentence with an article? And shunned? Well. I don’t know, but I was watching a movie earlier, in which a writer is asking someone what they think of his new novel, and refers to sentimentality as if it were bad. I think maybe we like to be sentimental. We like to go into the dark, warm places where the purblind puppies of memory are sleeping.

Pictures Of My Forgetting

Since I am being forgotten by time,
I offer these pictures of time I am losing.

I tell you I am aging relentlessly, blindly,
Open to the ocean air, like a sash window
framed by peeling paint. That’s how it is.
But I have been held close, held up,
into sunlight and moon wind, into branches
of old trees, held so tenderly and helped
to lean out over water rushing into death.

You and I are still alive. Don’t be afraid.

You know that life is hiding from us, though
we caught a glimpse this morning, where
it fell as light on the carpet by the door.
It rose and flew like a moth down the long
hall and disappeared. As a child I saw it rest
that way. It would lie by the window while
morning arrived and my grandmother
was singing in another room. It fluttered
by and rested a while on my hand. It spread
its wings and loved me, whispering a psalm.

The house is gone but not that room, not yet.

Look at this candle on the desk. Its tiny flame
is all we know of fire, no less than a sun. And all of
time is moving in this single clock. I wind it
twice a week and see behind the glass the marks
where Papa’s fingers brushed its face. We do not
die, his garden goes on forever. So we can see
him planting tomatoes in a day of late spring,
with Easter arisen, swaying in green
and yellow light. A breeze parts Grandma’s
linens drying on the line.

That day will live as long as we want it to.

From a distance he appears soft and kind
and now he is visible only at the focal length
of years. Seated on the sofa in an umber light
he sets his watch. Half past eternity. He looks
up at us as if to speak, but so much silence falls
between. Did he remember, as the evening
softened and grew dim, the cry of the dogs
through the tangled woods?

Did they know how much they were loved?