Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [137]
Wind from my love’s wings: beautiful shape, threading through a life and afterward, making things whole.
Like Beau and the seals. A year from that first difficult encounter, when he bedeviled the poor sick creature beached high on the edge of the dunes at Race Point, we walked that long fire-road path past the marsh where Wally’s ashes lie. (There—glittering beside those rocks where we stood—fragments of shell? chips of bone? Isn’t that the point, not to know?)
When we reached the shore he skirted the surf, sniffing at the breaking hemline of foam, and then looking out toward the source of that wild scent he spotted a dozen black heads eyeing him, riding on the crests and troughs of the waves, necks craned up to study the land-creature, brother (cousin?) from the other element. And Beau went into the water, intent, pure purpose. The seals didn’t budge. He floated six feet away from the first of them, head to head, studying. Then with a splash of tail the seal vanished, only to reappear a little farther out among the other heads.
Beau was, plainly, enchanted. His aim was play; he swam with abandon into the pod, which continued to await him and then dive, the game continuing, all of them moving farther out.
Until my golden friend was suddenly one of a flock of little heads some ways out from shore, and fear swept over me. How far would he go? Capable of intense passions, utterly single-minded, Beau might simply keep swimming, and what were the currents there? Would he know when he was too tired to go on?
When I could barely see the heads, the black dots of them indistinguishable from distant floating birds, I panicked, standing in the edge of the water myself and shouting his name.
I said to the air, Wally, bring him back. And then I couldn’t see any heads at all, not even that single one that had no place beneath the surface of the waves.
And just as I am praying and thinking I can’t do this, I can’t bear it, I can do it if I have to, don’t make me do it, having said yes he might disappear, my dog might simply walk into the sea and not walk out, I see this sleek little arrow shape coming in my direction, the golden fur dark now with salt water, intent on coming back to me.
On shore he’s joyous, more than half-possessed. Am I foolish for having been terrified when he’s an embodiment of pure delight, having been out there in the strangest of worlds, swimming for half an hour among a tribe he recognizes, though it tumbles in an alien medium? Well, I love him; I want him with me, and yet there’s something haunting and perfect about this, too. I think of what Jung said someplace, about children acting out the unconscious wishes of their parents; has Beau been swimming in the wild salt waters of my desire, really, out there among the somersaulting forms unfettered by gravity’s constraints?
Perhaps there isn’t one meaning to make of this story, of the seal’s apparitions and returns, the round of images that a life offers. Maybe only that we aren’t done with seals; the coherence of the story sweeps us up, stitches and braids the parts of a life together in terror and in joy. How much it helps to think that coherence might be given to us, might emerge from things themselves; perhaps our work is to recognize it.
Mystery
We don’t know where the dead are. But it’s just as true, finally, that we don’t know where we are. More things in heaven and earth, madam, than even a lifetime of experience in Abalone, Arizona, could avail you of.
Whatever this being of ours is, in its depth and complexity, we see only a little of it, and that little bit is too much for us, incomprehensible. If we know so little of ourselves, what could we hope to know about the dead?
In not-knowing, hope resides.
Sex
The comfort and actuality of the body is more poignant, underlined, when we know that the body can only comfort so much, that it will not stay. Sex is a way of entering the present, of moving through this moment’s offerings toward the next. Lust as hope: my dick