Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [141]
I thought, It’s a wolf, a timber wolf, and then thought no, there are no wolves here, it’s a dog. But no dog looks like that, or stands alone with that kind of authority and wildness. Then I thought, It’s one in the afternoon on Cape Cod and I’m staring at a coyote.
Then, from nowhere, I thought, He’s been with Wally, he’s come from Wally. I knew it as surely as I knew the lines of the poem. This apparition, my—ghost, was it? spirit animal? real creature carrying the presence of my love? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I’ve never seen one in the middle of the day before or since, and never been so frankly studied from the other side of wildness, from a world I cannot enter. Like my seals, the coyote stared back at us, and I could imagine in that gaze Wally’s look toward home—his old home—from the other world: not sad, exactly, but neutral, loving, curious, accepting. The dead regard us, I think, as animals do, and perhaps that is part of their relationship; they want nothing from us; they are pure presence, they look back to us from a world we can’t begin to comprehend. I am going on, the gaze said, in a life apart from yours, a good life, a wild life, unbounded.
The coyote was, for me, a blessing: different from what anyone supposed, and luckier. That night my friend Mekeel would dream of a coyote wandering the rooms of her house, a powerful and sleek animal who had come to bring her a single word: Safe. In the weeks and months after, in the stunned absence, in the hopeless hours, in the immobilized ache those are the words I’d reach for: lucky, safe. I think it was this visitation, this story, that most sustained me. The story itself, the image, not what the image means. I don’t know what it means, still, only the potent presence and consolation of the animal body, the gaze across the gulf of otherness. To those eyes I would return, over and over: different, and luckier.
But I didn’t know that yet. I turned to look at the dogs—both of them poised, perfectly still—and turned back just in time to see the coyote loping away, though at a little distance he was suddenly gone.
No watching him take off across marsh and dune; he’s vanished. Then Beau takes off after him, my inexhaustible golden rambler who’ll chase till he drops—but he merely circles and sniffs the place where the figure has been, and looks into the distance, and does not try to follow, as if he knows the chase is hopeless, that what he’d seen was somehow beyond him, unpursuable.
And I’m suddenly stumbling ahead, toward the stripe of sunlight that remains, gilding the dune between us and the sea beneath a sky entirely given over now to violet darkness. When the snow starts, will my coyote be out there someplace, leaping, nipping at the spinning flakes? Or is he not of this world at all, but a creature of the spirit’s coast, passing back and forth between elements and worlds—messenger, emblem, reminder? Whatever he is, he’s gone, and the dogs and I have turned up the slope of dune which will lead us to the sea.
We have walked into that golden band of light I’ve been watching. A wild and bracing wind is blowing off the Atlantic, and suddenly the biting air’s alive with big white flakes swirling in a shock of sunlight, and I’m alive with a strange kind of joy, stumbling up the dune into the winter wind, my face full of salt-spray and snow.
More Praise for
HEAVEN’S COAST
“Both an invitation and a gift. In this dazzling memoir, Mark Doty has achieved nothing less than a miracle.”
—Philadelphia