Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [122]
The stars over the beach were enormous, dazzling, the night so cold it seemed it might crack wide open to reveal—what?—more of that chill and impossible glitter turning over us, heaven’s endless spill of ice? I was shivering and crying out loud and lost in the beginning of raw grief—strange that one can seem numb and in endless pain at once, as if there was so much grieving that I could only feel a little edge of it, though that edge was enough to keep me immobile there on the black shore in front of the empty beachfront houses. The kind of grief that would begin when his body was gone, the helpless stumbling in which I’d live. The machinery of care would move in, tomorrow, the friends who’d make sure someone was with me all those first days, who’d help me plan the service and scrub and order the house for the gathering after the service, the hundred ritual things the bereaved do in order to mark the hours of passage. The friends who’d see me through when I could, myself, hardly see the new world I had fallen into.
His wife Camille on her deathbed, Monet writes, “I found myself, without being able to help it, in a study of my beloved wife’s face, systematically noting the colors.”
What does a writer do, when the world collapses, but write?
The first thing I wrote in my journal, a month after Wally died, was something I’d heard on the radio: Ninety per cent of the matter in the universe is invisible, unaccounted for.
February. How can I begin, how can I not begin?
I’m not allowed to refuse the task, says a voice in my head. But then I don’t really want to refuse it. It’s just finding the strength. I will be swept off my feet, I will be unable to stand up any longer in these great knock-me-over waves of feeling, my legs won’t hold me.
Then I remember being with Wally, at Herring Cove, some July or August evening, one of those late hours at the beach when the light is long and golden, the air warm, hardly anyone around, so that the two of us, naked, were playing in the surf, Arden swimming out to rescue us, barking, the waves breaking over his head so that he became our sleek seal-eyed companion. The knock and tumble of waves was something we could ride, a rhythm of swell which freed us from earth, our feet lifted up, bodies carried a little of the distance toward heaven by the water’s unpredictable undulance. May feeling be like that—may it carry these pages, carry me, and lift me and set me back down again on earth.
(I never used to save copies of my own letters, in the days of typewriters, but with computers, it’s nearly automatic. This one was written to a poet whose work and spirit I love, not the Phil of “Phil and Bill” but another Philip.)
February 26, 1994
Dear Phil,
I’m just getting to the point where sentences start to fit together again, but I’ve been wanting to write for a while to thank you for your letter, and to tell you how glad I was to spend time with you and Fran at Jane’s back in November—that seems like years ago now—and say hello. I’ve felt you around in the atmosphere here, actually, since I’ve been reading The Bread of Time and loving bearing that unmistakable voice—passion and good humor, rage at injustice, plain human wonder at the weirdness and beauty of things. I am about halfway through, but that’s because I want the book to last—as well as because these days I can read for short bursts of time and then find I fall right to sleep. There’s a lot of sleeping to be done, as well as a whole lot of other stuff, two-thirds of which I swear I don’t understand at all