Heaven's Coast
Page 31
And then I let it go.
It feels like exploding, like being born, like breaking apart into a field of stars.
My body has fallen open—arms extended, legs spread, a complete relinquishment—but I feel as if I’m still opening out, extending on beyond the limits of my body; I am spreading out and out, I don’t think there’s any limit to how far I will go. I’m making sounds, I’m crying, sometimes loud, tears, laughter, groaning. Sometimes I’m thrashing, overtly, and other times what is rippling through me is the slightest wave inside a muscle.
It goes on and on, the self thinning and spreading like spilt oil, endless, beyond any notion of boundary.
I’m hardly myself now, but a great wide field.
And I think, God is there, or, there is God. I know, through and through. Great grief, great god; where there is one, there is the other.
And I think, all along I’ve been this, have been part of this great intimacy and light, that immense kindness that was holding me, supporting me, but I hadn’t been able to let myself know it. And I’m laughing and weeping at the idea that I had to be forty to find this out. I’m thinking how much love there’s been in my life, how much suffering—my mother, my father, Wally, Lynda—and how we didn’t know who we were, through the pain, that even that was a part of God.
My hips are vibrating; that’s the space, I think, where my doubt has been. And that space is being filled now with this warm loving energy that is healing my body. I know then I’m going to heal, and I feel the increasing fire of a kind of intense vibration, in my belly and chest, energy circling around in me.
A whirlwind.
I hear the border of its enormous, rushing roar.
How long did I stay there?
In a while, in no time, I’m dimly aware of M. on the other side of the room. Slowly, I’m coming back to myself. He says something vague, and after another long time I’m opening my eyes, I’m slowly sitting up, standing up, stretching. M’s sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette. It feels so good to stand, feeling my weight balanced on both my legs, my body alive, flexible, light, the life moving in me.
That night I sleep deeply, insensate; the next day I’m still sleepy, a bit sore, sense my body changing, emotion floating up out of nowhere, little tensions coming and going in my muscles, the strange sensation of having been swept up, set down again.
It wasn’t that I was healed, right then; the muscles in my spine, my unhappy disk still had its course to run, its process to move through. But something essential, something that reshapes a life had happened to me. How can I explain, moving into that territory where language fails? What have I been doing, through all this story, but moving closer to the unsayable’s edge?
I had risen—in the three hours I’d later learn I’d lain on M.’s table—to a kind of awareness above the everyday, above the individual forms of loss and longing, desire and grief, toward a great, benign indifference, an indifference which is the force of life itself. This is one of the paradoxes at the heart of the world: the Whirlwind is indifferent, but this indifference is utterly, profoundly good.
The Universe doesn’t care about Job’s suffering, and will not intervene. And the Universe loves Job with the intensity and tenderness with which everything in the world is held. It’s Job’s vision which is limited, our human eyes which can’t apprehend the design, the sense of it. So that when Job cries out against all the grief his life has brought him, the Voice from the Whirlwind says to him:
Who is this whose ignorant words
smear my design with darkness?
That design—ferocious wisdom, implacable light, time’s ineluctable unfolding—is too large and brilliant for us to see, though sometimes we can feel the edge of the storm.
After that, I went back to seeing Glen, the sweet, familiar masseur I visit from time to time, who makes me feel relaxed and calm, in my body, in the daily world.
Luckier
This is the story I’ve been saving.
A week and a few days after Wally died, I took the dogs to walk at Hatch’s Harbor, along the long dike that leads across the salt marsh out toward the lighthouse and the far point.
February must have just begun, and the sky was poised on the exact cusp of a storm, half a chilly, bright winter blue and half a billowing dark line of snow clouds. How can something full of so much whiteness be so black? Is it the sheer density of what’s contained inside the cloud, worlds upon worlds of snow, which will soon disperse into a perfect, rhythmic scattering, going on and on for hours?
I left the house in sunlight, but by the time I got to the turnout beside the fire road the horizon was layered with deepening bands and swirls of charcoal, grayish violet, smoky black. The distant line of dunes, out across the marsh, was still sun-struck, gilded, a glowing bar beneath the expanse of darkened heaven. Under the storm, that radiance seemed intensified, alluring.
Walking along the narrow road, through the scrub of the low dune lands, then out onto the dike bisecting the marsh, I kept my eyes—like a pilgrim—on that band of hills. I found myself thinking of Whitman, in particular of the part of “Song of Myself” that begins
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
What I could remember of the poem began to unroll in my head, with its long-lined marching cadences, its plain-spoken but encantatory, biblical music. In the secondhand college edition of the poem I still read, some long-ago student wrote next to these lines, “Isn’t it grass?” which I suppose must be a marker of the demarcation between the poetic sensibility and its pragmatic opposite. For Whitman, plainly, it is not enough to say it’s grass. He spins out a stunning series of metaphors, guessing about its nature; is it “the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven”? Or “the handkerchief of the Lord,” dropped in order to make us notice the embroidery of the owner’s name? Or is the grass a hieroglyph of democracy, growing among all equally, regardless of race or social position?
And then Whitman drops the poem’s bombshell, in an image whose yoking of the lovely and terrible still shocks, after a hundred and forty years: “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”
He imagines, joyously, the origins of the grass in the bodies of dead young men, old people, babies, mothers. It is a meditation both literal (the buried dead are pushing up “so many uttering tongues”) and figurative, and it moves Whitman to a question, the core question of our lives, which he answers, in the swift and assured conclusion, with an almost unimaginable authority.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere.
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if there ever was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it…
I’d been walking with my head down, crying, feeling my way through my shaky memory of the poem. I hadn’t read it in years; I don’t know where it came from, in my memory, what triggered my recall. The lines, what I could recapture of them, felt like company, like the steadying arm of a companion, a voice of certainty. I was putting one foot in front of the other, not looking up, trying to focus on the words, and I came to the poem’s end, those lines I had been traveling toward as surely as I had been walking here, to the end of the dike just before the high sun-washed dunes began.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.
And then I looked up, into the face of a coyote.
He was standing only a little ways from the dike, perfectly still, eyeing us with a calm and frank curiosity, and he was utterly beautiful—big, full-bodied, not the scrawny creature of the night supposed to haunt local garbage cans, carrying off the occasional cat, but thick-furred, gleaming, the t
ips of each gray and blond hair dipped in sunlight. His eyes were golden, magnetic, inescapable. There was a moment when we all stopped—the dogs, the coyote, myself—and the world seemed in absolute suspension, nothing moving anywhere, everything centered around the fixity of our mutual gaze.
I thought, It’s a wolf, a timber wolf, and then thought no, there are no wolves here, it’s a dog. But no dog looks like that, or stands alone with that kind of authority and wildness. Then I thought, It’s one in the afternoon on Cape Cod and I’m staring at a coyote.
Then, from nowhere, I thought, He’s been with Wally, he’s come from Wally. I knew it as surely as I knew the lines of the poem. This apparition, my—ghost, was it? spirit animal? real creature carrying the presence of my love? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I’ve never seen one in the middle of the day before or since, and never been so frankly studied from the other side of wildness, from a world I cannot enter. Like my seals, the coyote stared back at us, and I could imagine in that gaze Wally’s look toward home—his old home—from the other world: not sad, exactly, but neutral, loving, curious, accepting. The dead regard us, I think, as animals do, and perhaps that is part of their relationship; they want nothing from us; they are pure presence, they look back to us from a world we can’t begin to comprehend. I am going on, the gaze said, in a life apart from yours, a good life, a wild life, unbounded.
The coyote was, for me, a blessing: different from what anyone supposed, and luckier. That night my friend Mekeel would dream of a coyote wandering the rooms of her house, a powerful and sleek animal who had come to bring her a single word: Safe. In the weeks and months after, in the stunned absence, in the hopeless hours, in the immobilized ache those are the words I’d reach for: lucky, safe. I think it was this visitation, this story, that most sustained me. The story itself, the image, not what the image means. I don’t know what it means, still, only the potent presence and consolation of the animal body, the gaze across the gulf of otherness. To those eyes I would return, over and over: different, and luckier.
But I didn’t know that yet. I turned to look at the dogs—both of them poised, perfectly still—and turned back just in time to see the coyote loping away, though at a little distance he was suddenly gone.
No watching him take off across marsh and dune; he’s vanished. Then Beau takes off after him, my inexhaustible golden rambler who’ll chase till he drops—but he merely circles and sniffs the place where the figure has been, and looks into the distance, and does not try to follow, as if he knows the chase is hopeless, that what he’d seen was somehow beyond him, unpursuable.
And I’m suddenly stumbling ahead, toward the stripe of sunlight that remains, gilding the dune between us and the sea beneath a sky entirely given over now to violet darkness. When the snow starts, will my coyote be out there someplace, leaping, nipping at the spinning flakes? Or is he not of this world at all, but a creature of the spirit’s coast, passing back and forth between elements and worlds—messenger, emblem, reminder? Whatever he is, he’s gone, and the dogs and I have turned up the slope of dune which will lead us to the sea.
We have walked into that golden band of light I’ve been watching. A wild and bracing wind is blowing off the Atlantic, and suddenly the biting air’s alive with big white flakes swirling in a shock of sunlight, and I’m alive with a strange kind of joy, stumbling up the dune into the winter wind, my face full of salt-spray and snow.
More Praise for
HEAVEN’S COAST
“Both an invitation and a gift. In this dazzling memoir, Mark Doty has achieved nothing less than a miracle.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“The same exquisite sensibility that informs Doty’s poetry is at work in this magnificent memoir…. Heaven’s Coast is more than the memory of the dying of a body; it is a record of the birthing of a spirit.”
—Seattle Times
“In Heaven’s Coast [Doty] has sung a lyric to his love, a rhapsody. Heaven’s Coast is both a journal of mourning and a memoir of heartache, an attempt through language to manage unmanageable grief…. Profoundly sad, yet somehow hopeful.”
—Newsday
“[A] luminous study of love and loss.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Day-to-day details are often transformed by beautiful or cutting verse.”
—Out
“A wonderfully written book…a work of humility.”
—Hartford Courant
“With a poet’s precise economy of language, Doty meditates on his relationship with his dying lover…. He has a gift for coaxing insight from the seemingly commonplace.”
—The Nation
“Doty’s is that rare book about death and dying that reading it makes us glad to be alive in this world and able to love someone, even while knowing that someday we will lose them.”
—Asheville Citizen-Times
“A heart, a soul sing of love and loss in this beautifully and powerfully wrought remembrance given us by one of our finest poets. Mark Doty’s lyrical, deeply affecting voice, so poised and compelling in his poems, sustains itself wonderfully over the long, brave haul of this venture of his into prose. Always he is warm, honest, generous—a writer with so very much to tell us, teach us, give to us.”
—Robert Coles
“Mark Doty understands the rhythms of language, riding them like a gull on the wind. Heaven’s Coast is just that graceful, but also rich in sturdy earthbound wisdom. It broke my heart, then somehow made it stronger.”
—Armistead Maupin
“Heaven’s Coast is a radiant and profound work of art. Reading it was a transforming experience, so much so that I’m afraid I may need months or years to fully comprehend what it’s meant to me. For now, all I can say is that I’m astonished by Mark Doty’s command not only of language but of the shifting, nearly inchoate mortal conditions language seeks to illuminate. During the time I was reading Heaven’s Coast I found myself wanting to call everyone I knew and say, ‘Stop whatever you’re doing and read this book.’ I suspect it will prove to be an enduring accomplishment.”
—Michael Cunningham
ALSO BY MARK DOTY
Turtle, Swan (1987)
Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991)
My Alexandria (1993)
Atlantis (1995)
Heaven’s Coast (1996)
Sweet Machine (1998)
Firebird (1999)
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (2001)
Source (2001)
School of the Arts (2005)
Copyright
HEAVEN’S COAST. Copyright © 1996 by Mark Doty. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2008 ISBN: 9780061871634
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