by Mark Doty
Is that my work, to point to the world and say, See how darkly it sparkles?
House Finches
Spring has opened its big green hands.
Yesterday I noticed that there was actually shade, beautiful greenish shade, under the box-alder tree beside my kitchen. The shadow of leaves appeared against the white clapboards of my neighbor’s garage; how long since I’ve seen the shadow of leaves, one of those things that vanish all winter, though we seldom notice that they’ve gone until their reemergence. The first buds of the three-foot crabapple I planted three summers ago have opened.
But the new season’s surest evidence is the presence of two house finches, little rose-throated gray birds who’ve begun to nest in a climbing rose that scrambles up the wall beside my bedroom window. All morning they perched on the points of the fence pickets, threads of straw and grass hanging from their beaks, before they’d dart out of view. Going out to the garden, later, to take the dogs out for a noontime walk in the woods, there was a hurried rustle and then two arcs so quick as to be almost unseeable out of the thickening green of the rose’s tumble of briers. There, half-made, was a fragile cup of ocher, its form apparent even though it wasn’t yet solidly built, light still shining through the bowl which would, in time, support the eggs.
House finches: I love the warmth and domesticity of the name, and their habit of nesting up against walls, in any sort of shelter or pocket that will protect them. The first ones came from China, fifty years ago, brought to New York City as pets; freed, they established themselves in the East across a territory that grows wider over the years. I’ve known them before, and probably that’s part of why they seem to me the real heralds of spring, their appearance that announcement of the new season which is the one to be believed, the one to be celebrated.
The other pair I knew was in Vermont, back when whatever shadows darkened our horizon were the ordinary ones—jobs, money, how to make the best of our lives—those things that are momentous, but come to seem luxurious considerations when illness fills up the stage of a life, or two lives. In those days we lived in a ramshackle thirteen-room Victorian house in Montpelier. I’d gotten a grant from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, just before we left Boston to come north for a teaching job for me. The generous foundation gave me a check for $7,500, a princely sum for us, and we decided to use it as a down payment for a house, since property in the north was cheap then. Even at the low prices of 1985, what we looked at was far beyond our means; we were despondent and about to give up when our realtor drove us past the flat-roofed, down-at-the-heels New England version of an Italian villa, its handsome form abused by a sea of mustard paint trimmed in chocolate brown. Yellow and brown, for some reason, is a traditional combination in Vermont’s working-class neighborhoods. There was a for sale sign on the rickety picket fence, which had been forced to wear the same shade of chocolate.
“That?” the realtor said when we asked. “Oh, you don’t want to see that house. That ought to be torn down.” Which was really all we needed to hear, contrary creatures, scavengers, aficionados of barn sales and other people’s attics that we were. And it did turn out to be like a barn sale, really—except that we bought the barn, for twenty-nine thousand dollars. It had no insulation, an antique wood-fired furnace that consumed whole cords of timber in a wink, and period plumbing of unquestionable authenticity. Whether the flat roof was a concession to poverty or the Italianate fashion I never knew, but in the course of one Vermont winter the absolute madness of the idea became clear. Snowfall after snowfall meant shoveling the roof, and as soon as there was a bit of a thaw ice dams pushed at the spongy old roofing material until the melting water began to drip, and then to cascade, into our bedroom.
But that was all down the road. First the sellers, Clayton and Rita, taught us the intricacies of the furnace, the mysteries of a kerosene-burning stove. Rita worked in a clothespin factory and made all Clayton’s meals; he gathered mushrooms and cut firewood, though I never saw him do anything but sit at the kitchen table and smoke. They sized us up in five minutes, and seemed perfectly happy to accept us as a couple, especially once they’d figured out that Rita could talk to Wally about where to shop while Clayton told me about maintenance, shoveling, plumbing—men’s work. He’d even make jokes about the fussy concerns of wives, winking at me and nodding in Rita and Wally’s direction.
Once Clayton and Rita vacated for their new house, we found ourselves alone in thirteen rooms of linoleum concealing wide-plank floors, cheap lumberyard paneling covering up layer upon layer of wallpaper roses. The house had long been inhabited in the manner of poor Vermonters who made do, got by, put a patch on what broke. It had been a long time since that house had gotten any serious attention; had it ever gotten serious attention? But it didn’t matter a bit how much work confronted us, or that the renovation would turn out, eventually, to be unfinishable work—what mattered was it was ours, a great rambling dream of a house, eccentric, temperamental, rife with character, capable of being profoundly loved. And we were thrilled; the house was ours to rescue, to uncover, to inhabit, to play with, a piece of the world on which to make our mark.
For the five years we lived there—in which time my hands, or Wally’s, must have touched every surface of that house, inside and out, as we painted and plastered and stripped and cursed, built and caulked and wept—every penny we could make went into the house. Mustard and chocolate gave way to a creamy colonial yellow, white trim, and blue shutters; the town paper suddenly carried an article about “the rising tide of gentrification.” In a while it had a rainproof roof shielding new insulation, new chimney linings, a huge soapstone woodstove big enough to defeat—almost—the bitter Januaries of the snow queen. (Bobby or Lynda, visiting, used to wrap up in layers and layers; he in sweaters, she in kimonos and tunics and a plethora of scarves.)
And we bought a new pair of storm doors, beautiful ones, which brings me back to the finches. The house had a narrow double front door, still sporting its figured brass hardware, patterns half-obscured now with a hundred years of paint—handsome doors, but not very practical ones, since it was impossible to effectively block their drafty cracks and seams. For a while we sealed them off with plastic, six months of the year, and then it seemed time—the rest of the house was at least that much ready—to use the front door as it was meant to be used. At a salvage company I found just the right thing—for the proverbial arm and leg, but it was grant money, and it was for our house. Oh rationalization that justified many an expense we couldn’t afford, many an hour spent in the hard folding chairs of auctions, many a Saturday rooting in some collapsing barn! Just the right thing was a pair of oak doors, multipaned; they were french doors, really, but with the right varnish and framing they made the most splendid storm doors imaginable. It was the storm door raised to the level of art, and so the entryway of the house took on its proper dignity, a happy transition from the outer world to the inner one. At Christmas they were best, decked out and inviting.
It’s true the invitation was mostly to ourselves, and for a few good friends at the college where I taught, since we fit into our little Vermont town none too well; we were the only out gay male couple in the whole place, and though we were thoroughly accepted by the town’s liberal community (that over-layer of exiles which make Vermont culture tolerable) we were strange new creatures to the ur-layer of native Vermonters who made up the town’s human bedrock. And who, significantly, made up most of our neighborhood. Our house wasn’t cheap just because the floors sagged; it took us a while to learn what people meant by that insistent talk about location.
But we had a world for ourselves there, and one very real advantage to living with a window designer was that he could make anything look good—the right arrangement, a little fussing with the details: splendor! The high ceilings accommodated a huge tree at Christmas, thus making use of the ornaments Wally had been squirreling away for a lifetime, souvenirs of other people’s childhoods collected at a decade of yar
d sales: Bohemian glass beads strung into crystalline snowflakes, great garlands of shimmering glass, an under-tree world of ancient toys. The big granite cellar was perfect for the universe of display props Wally used for store windows. For me, a realm of gardens, borders of perennials out front (against the now properly white picket fence, every new picket of it cut with my own hands) and herbs and vegetables out back.
And doors to deck. One Christmas we made boxwood wreaths from cuttings I took from the ruins of a formal rose garden at the college; one hung on each of the gleaming oak doors. They looked so classic, and lasted so long, that by early spring they were still hanging there, plain without their ribbons and trim, cheerful and promising—qualities which Vermonters need desperately, suicidally, in February and March.
This is where the house finches come in. I noticed that every time I opened the door there’d be a buzz of winged activity, something hurrying through the branches of the wide old lilac. And every time we’d come home, a parallel commotion. Soon we saw what the fuss was about, which was the house these two new colonizers had made for themselves, a woven bowl of grasses and straw nestled into one of the wreaths, built against the glass. At eye level! We stopped using the front door right away, and rigged a system of reflective plastic film inside to allow us to watch, quietly, from the front hallway, our tenants about their work. Their long work, it turned out, weeks of sitting, the male coming and going, leaving and returning with food, and then, miracles! A cluster of mouths and necks and awkward featherless gray about-to-be-wings writhing in the nest, a cup of pure and insistent hunger.
Once they’d all gone on, the nest having served its purpose, we considered saving it—but it was too well used a thing, too stained and too shit-in. It made us happy to have been host, for our house to be home, even briefly, to some other life, some welcome and mysterious pulse of energy from the outer world. Where would the new finches go? The bird book said they fed in the wild, individually, in summer, then formed great flocks in fall. I liked to imagine a cloud of them, a storm of gray and rose.
I didn’t think of the house finches again until this new pair showed up in the roses, spring incarnate, pulses of desire and intention. How little they’d weigh, if you could hold one, and how utterly intent they are on their purpose, possessed by their own green and burgeoning industry: to build, to nest, to rear. We further the world, small as we are, little handfuls of feather and heartbeat; we make it go on.
My friend Chris said that after his wife died, in winter, spring was painful to him, all the world but her—and him—renewing itself. I don’t find that spring hurts. I am aware that my interior season is winter, the republic of bare branches, the austere structure at the heart of things. And yet I take pleasure in my garden, even if my heart’s not in it in the way it has been other years. In Vermont I gardened with a vengeance, that fire a part of my own imperative to make a safe home, to surround myself with a place to stand. And raise, unlike the birds, not young, but ourselves. And splendid lilies, monkshood and delphinium, campanula and strawflowers and love-in-a-mist.
When we came to Provincetown, I loved my much smaller garden, a little cottage plot—infinitely more manageable, and small gardens actually are more likely to open onto revelation than large ones; in the intricacy of a contained space the world opens, the way it does in a Cornell box. On the Cape the sea warms the air a bit in winters, and cools in it summers, so that the climate partakes of the marine, of English weather. Thus roses thrive, lavish and luxuriant sprawlers, and if the sandy soil is infertile it also makes for fabulous drainage. I’ve gardened joyfully here.
But this year, no rush to buy seeds, no pushing at the limits imposed by frost or cool wet nights. I am in no hurry, am no jubilant participant, although I am glad for spring to unfold.
And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that’s as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so heavy so long. At first I felt odd—as if I shouldn’t be feeling this lightness, that familiar little catch of pleasure in the heart which is inexplicable, though a lovely passage of notes or the splendidly turned petal of a tulip has triggered it. It comes back to me as if from a great distance, this old delight in the world. It’s my buoyancy, part of what keeps me alive—and I realize suddenly I can’t remember when I felt it last. It’s a sort of feeling that doesn’t want to be long examined; happy, suddenly, with the concomitant experience of a sonata and the motion of the shadows of leaves, I just want to breathe in that lightness, after it’s been so long lost.
Something about this new sunlight and warmth begins to dispel something darker and colder in me. I have the desire to be filled with sunlight, to soak my skin in as much of it as I can drink up, after the long interior darkness of this past season, the indoor vigil, in this harshest and darkest of winters, outside and in.
So this afternoon I lay on a high hill, a dune at the top (and it seemed the heart) of the world, surrounded by blooming beach plums, the glazed new leaves of poison ivy. I lay against the warm body of the hill, a child, and there was some generous and laving quality about the sunlight that allowed me to let go, to let all of tension and grief and chill sink out of me, into the sand, which was old enough and warm enough to hold it all. A few inches down the sand’s still cool and moist, this time of year, but it’s been busy drinking in the sun as well, and its surface glows and invites like human skin.
In the night it rained, and the wind blew hard, dislodging some canes of the climbing rose from the anchors which pin them to the walls. I think the finches’ nest has been jostled; it seems more exposed, and maybe squeezed a bit, not quite so shapely. The birds are nowhere around; have they given up on this site already, subject to their implacable imperative, and moved on?
What a fragile thing a house is, though it doesn’t seem so. All the energy we poured into the house in Vermont couldn’t complete it; it was so big, and so needy, that I used to dream, even after five years, of part of the house falling away, the sloping floors gone their way at last, tumbling in the direction they’d always pined for. Or I’d dream of whole rooms I hadn’t even discovered yet—rooms which, of course, needed immediate and serious attention. By the time I was just getting to some project I’d long postponed, I’d find that something done years before needed doing again. There was barely time to enjoy that particularly homosexual pleasure, decor; there was too much work to be done. Paint peels, plaster cracks, and gardens, of course, are the most ephemeral constructions of all.
What disappears faster than a garden without a gardener?
I learned just how fast and entire the loss of a garden is when we left Vermont. The back, private part of the garden was the last thing I studied, just before we left; I stood up on the deck above that geometry of paths and raised beds and looked down into the heart of it. It was a kind of externalization of something essential in me—is that what all gardens are?—and it had anchored me, mirrored me back, held me in place. I like the psalmist’s phrase: a dwelling place; I didn’t understand how intensely that garden had become a dwelling place for my spirit until I left it. Wally found me there, holding onto the railing we’d built ourselves, its turned spindles the salvage of some Victorian porch from a little town down the road. I wanted to go, and at the same time I knew I was taking leave, that moment, of some irreplaceable part of the history of my heart.
Not that I regret that decision, or have ever done so. We stayed in Vermont a year after Wally tested positive, reeling with the news at first and then beginning our accommodation to what Wallace Stevens called “the pressure of reality.” The more reality pushes against us, Stevens said, the more the imagination is compelled to press back. He was referring to making poems, but it’s also true that our imaginations went to work on a more pragmatic level. How was this news to fit into our lives? That mortal sword that hangs over all our heads hanging now a little lower, how w
ere we to live? Wally was fine, then, physically, but his T-cell counts (vague marker that they are) weren’t impressive ones, and we couldn’t help but imagine versions of the future. In Vermont we felt as if our reality was exactly that—ours, not a shared sense of the world but an isolating otherness. My sense of what lay ahead, should we continue to stay there, was of a narrowing darkness and solitude, an increasing struggle against increasingly difficult demands. And how, someday, was I going to get in six cords of wood by myself?
A pair of friends, Chris and Brigid, offered to buy our house. It was easier to relinquish it to them—this would be their first house, too, and they brought to the prospect of owning it great eagerness, and a palpable love for the place, difficulties and all, which was what pleased me most. This wasn’t entirely an easy house to love, ungainly and oddly laid out and, for all our five years’ efforts, presenting inexhaustible prospects for the next energetic dwellers.
And so we let it go. As well as the grief I felt, abandoning my garden, and the groundedness it stood for, there was a real joy, an energizing quality in moving ahead. We were taking charge of the future, or at least a part of it. The test results had seemed to take the future away from us; letting go of our old life, pouring our energies into getting ourselves to a new place, was a way of wresting a bit of that control back. We all put up with less appealing aspects of the present for the sake of a future we anticipate later on. An HIV diagnosis calls the wisdom of such deferral into question. What were the pleasures we wanted now? How did we want to use our time together?
