Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [138]
And sex is an acknowledgment of the mystery of flesh, its dimensionality and weight. In touch and touch, feeling the limits of the body with our hands, testing its boundaries.
Aretha Franklin
This voice says, No matter what, I’m here, I hold up, I carry on. And I am not suffering powerlessly; I take charge of what I can, I claim and shout myself, I hold forth, I hold on, take from me what you will. And the song that I make out of my continuing itself sustains.
Longing
No matter what, I want more.
I’m driving on the Cape, listening to our local community radio station, a volunteer effort that is sometimes charmingly amateurish, sometimes annoying dull, occasionally terrific. Today they’re playing a syndicated gay and lesbian news program, homos all over the world. Here’s a story about newly legalized gay and lesbian marriage in Sweden; at a Stockholm ceremony, couples are exchanging vows, then whooping it up in celebration.
And before I know what hits me, I’ve burst into tears.
Now I have all kinds of political positions about this. I am not at all sure I like the institution of marriage—look at the difficult, calcified relationships all around us, the predetermined meanings and associations such a sanctioned union places on a couple—and I don’t really know, intellectually, that I think this heterosexual model’s a good one for gay couples to follow. I turned down an opportunity to edit a book, a compilation of poems and quotations for people to use in commitment ceremonies and the like, because I just wasn’t convinced it was a notion I really supported. Didn’t we gain from having to make up our own rules, renegotiate and understand our own relationships day by day, year by year?
And yet, hearing these shouts and cheers, my ideas go right out the window. I’m crying because I wish I could have married Wally, because I’ll never be able to now. Rationally I know that a ceremony and a piece of paper don’t change a thing; we wouldn’t have been closer, our connection deeper.
But I want it anyway, I want more. Isn’t that what we’d want to say of any relationship, I’d have been right there for more, I’d have wanted more?
Whirlwind
This is what happened, my last massage with M.
I was still in pain then, didn’t yet feel I’d begun to heal. (I remember, exactly, the day I knew I had turned the corner. It was weeks later, in a friend’s cottage, on Long Island, a little studio on a cove which curves inward from the Sound. I’d had days of sleep, reading, walking, more sleep, a sense of restoration, unhurriedness, a luxury and liberty of time. Easy days, the dogs wandering in and out. The day I was to leave, getting ready, picking up the place and stowing things in the car, I suddenly noticed that I didn’t hurt. Not with the deep sense of woundedness, the aching fragility way down in the joints. And that knowledge lifted my spirits; I began to feel I had possibilities in front of me again. A few nights later, lying on the sand at Head of the Meadow, a wide Atlantic beach, my head toward a great blond tangle of driftwood, a twisted trunk polished the sheen and hue of moonlight, suddenly I felt so awake, such a sense of freedom of all I could do. How long had it been since I’d felt like that?)
But that was all in the future still. On M.’s table I am fragile, unmended.
He begins with a sort of passive yoga, moving my body into various postures for lengthening, stretching out my spine. I feel pleasure in those movements, even though they also hurt a little, frighten me a bit; couldn’t he really hurt me, if I let go too much, or moved the wrong way?
I guess I can’t be hurt, really, relaxed as I’m becoming, but there’s that fear. Surely part of the stiffness in my back is fear, yes? Afraid to be too fluid, to be carried away.
I’m thinking about holding on, about Wally’s body. Tension in my arms, resistance. Thinking I didn’t want to let his body go, shouldn’t have let him go.
M. has me begin a cycle of strange breathing—rapid short inhalations, then holding my breath, expelling it. I do this again and again, the