Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [13]
The eyes. Besides life, they are all that is missing from the body, and it is this absence that finally makes the form before me seem not at rest but dead. Gulls have taken the eyes away with their insistent beaks; their footprints are stamped all around the head like ancient letters on the clay tablets of Babylon. The law which they inscribe is that of hunger; what is soft, what is unguarded, what yields to them is what sustains those white engines, all wings and throat, which carry an appetite so large it obliterates all else. At first when I see that the eyes are gone, I think this is terrible and I imagine I will be unable to keep looking, but it isn’t like that. Having been with Wally at the end of his life and then with Wally’s body—form in repose—there is something new and unflinching in my looking at flesh. The spaces where the seal’s eyes were…sockets doesn’t seem the right word, these are little caverns of bone, reddened with a bit of blood, their depths not entirely visible. They enter deep into the sleek face, beneath the whiskers and the sweet upward curve of the mouth which one wants to read, in the living animal, as a smile. In death the mouth is relaxed, as blank and unreadable as the face of a sleeper.
Wally’s body was almost unspeakably beautiful to me. All the last months of his illness, his head had been turning to the left on his pillow in a way that looked uncomfortable or rigid; people were forever straightening him out. This seemed intended to make him comfortable, but perhaps had more to do with the helper’s need for a more familiar kind of alignment. In a moment, the muscles in his neck would pull again back to the left, and over time they became so stiff that it was difficult to bring his head back to center. This was something to do with whatever unnamed thing was happening in his brain; as happens after a stroke, the sides of his body behaved in different ways, not quite in concert. After he died, his head lolled to the right freely and loosely, as though the tendons could at last compensate for the time they’d been taut. There was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin. Which seemed polished, as it cooled, though not stiff; it was as if his body moved toward the condition of marble, but marble that’s been palmed and warmed, touched until it picks up something of human heat. The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don’t know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers.
It is strange now to write this—after eight weeks—with the kind of odd detachment that language can lend us. It’s as if I am watching myself—not in the plain light of film or the factual journalistic one of videotape, but as if through some kind of antique instrument, one which preserves the luster of the moment, the beauty of its peculiar light. Which seems to me now like the light of Dutch still life: rainy, northern, gentle, interior light that has itself a kind of resonance and presence. The instrument through which I look at that night (curious now that it seems instead like a deep winter afternoon, a snow-locked day at the very heart of winter, far inside the body of time) holds me at enough of a distance that I can describe what I see, that I can bear to look and to render, and yet it preserves the intimacy of those