Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [140]
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