Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [3]
Will there be a moment when you will die to me?
Of course you will cease to breathe, sometime; probably you will cease to breathe before I do, though there’s no way to know this, really. But your being, your being-in-me, will last as long as I do, won’t it? There’s a poem of Tess Gallagher’s about the aftermath of her husband’s death, one called “Now That I Am Never Alone.” Of course.
Is my future, then, remembering you? Inscribing the name, carrying the memory? Remembering is the work of the living, and the collective project of memory is enormous; it involves the weight of all our dead, the ones we have known ourselves and the ones we know only from stories. It is necessary to recall not just names but also faces, anecdotes, incidents, gestures, tics, nuances, those particular human attributes that distinguish us as individuals. A name, after all, stripped of contexts, is only a name. Lists of them, like the ones read at ceremonies around the Quilt, remind us of enormity, scale, the legions of the dead. Details, stories, remind us of the particular loved body and being of X and Y or—say it—W.
Even photos, after a while, lend themselves to speculation. When I was a child we had a big metal fruitcake tin, the kind printed with golden trellises and scrolls, full of family photos. Many of them were inherited, and even though there were names penned on the back—Alice, Lavinia, Mary—over time an increasing number of them went unrecognized, anyone who could identify them gone. Although we had names for them, and faces, they had lost their particular humanness when we no longer had their stories.
Let this, then, be one more inscription, one version of my and Wally’s story. We have been together a dozen years, fused in a partnership that felt, after a while, elemental, like bedrock. If I write about it as if it’s already done, that’s because so much of it is—W. is less present, each week spends more time asleep, and is less and less capable of involvement in the stuff of mutual life. We’re pushed into a different kind of relation. (Those sentences were true when I wrote them, but this week he’s much more alert—still unable to walk but ready to get out of the house, ready to shop for new shoes and magazines. It’s only Wednesday and this week we have already been out three times, me pushing the wheelchair to town, to restaurants where we can sit outside, along the rough street and rougher sidewalk. We are laughing a lot, full of the pleasures of reprieve. Nothing about who we are together has changed. We have a present again.)
“Look, I am living,” Rilke writes in the Duino Elegies. “On what? Neither childhood nor future/ grows any smaller.” Like most great poems, I guess, this is both true and not true. Certainly the past is accomplished, complete; what has been is over and nothing can change it now, nothing can change except our perspectives, the way we interpret or understand. And the future is infinite, if not our personal fates then that great flux of matter and spirit which goes on, in which we will in some way participate—as energy if not as individuals.
Mourning contracts the eye like a camera lens in strong light; the aperture of the soul shrinks to a tiny pinpoint which admits only grief. The past feels diminished when the future seems to shrink. When I am overcome—as I am, about once a week—by the prospect of losing my lover, I can’t see any kind of ongoingness; my vision becomes one-pointed, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, and the world seems smaller,