Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [31]
A little bigger still, the width now of a dessert plate, and there’s a fringe of red threads around the rim, only a few in the smaller ones and then, as they grow larger, a bloody sci-fi halo of tangled whips.
And here is the prize, a grand—mother? papa? (They seem at once too primeval and too sophisticatedly other to be gendered.) Of all these beached starships, this one’s arrived at the greatest level of complexity. Around the central, yellow sun with its bold rays are ringed smaller suns, out toward the edge, which sports an oxblood fringe like some obscure piece of Victorian bric-a-brac. It’s a glorious and peculiar disk, and I can only imagine how much more complicated and intricate it must have been in the water, animated, pulsing, and distending. A dream flower, blossom of a surrealist garden.
Why have they washed ashore?
Kind death? I can’t even imagine their lives. These are the flattened flowers of otherness; imagine—try—their subjectivity. I try often to pour myself into the dogs’ way of being in the world. I like trying to set myself aside, getting as close as I can (admittedly, not very, but exhilarating anyway) to a world seen through those chestnut eyes, apprehended through the nose, delicate instrument unraveling scent’s histories and narratives. But these jellyfish I can’t get close to at all, though I can trace in the remains all around me the way this aspic organizes itself from next to nothing, a clear little squib, into this complicated, architectonic event: some kind of flattened art glass paperweight, a vaguely unfriendly example of Art Nouveau? Out of their element, they are evaporating, vanishing.
Walking in the marsh, standing on this shore, what do I stand on but the vast accumulated evidence of death? What do I confront, day after day, but death and death?
For weeks now I have been watching the skeleton of a dolphin, beached in the marsh, further out than we’re walking today. I encountered it first when it was a full-fleshed black and white beauty, a small dolphin, recently dead, I think, since the gulls had only just begun to attack. The high contrast of its two colors made it crisp and sleek as a race car. It had come to rest in that arced position of leaping dolphins—the flying forms on Minoan walls. Even in repose it seemed to move.
On each succeeding visit, there was less to see, and more; the flesh gone, the skin becoming leather wrapped around a yard of bone, then gradually the pure configuration of bone itself exposed.
Dolphins have a rib cage not entirely unlike ours, beneath which the long spine narrows and curves into the odd, rubbery fan of the tail, which remained intact while other soft parts of the body vanished. Oddest of all was the skull, something like a bird’s but broad and solid. In the shrinking of the fish’s form its ancestral relationship to flying creatures seemed to become clearer and clearer, as if what I were seeing were simply the remains of a bird who’d lost its wings.
I loved that broad, strange head, and I thought about taking it home with me, to keep in a cabinet where I have shells and seagulls’ skulls, and abandoned nests, and an elaborate whorled fungus from a Vermont birch tree—a sort of Victorian naturalist’s vitrine, though in no scientific order, no pattern except an aesthetic one.
But when I touched it, the skull by this time attached to the spine by only a little bit of the dark leather the skin had become, I had the clearest sense that the bones belonged where they were, intact, or rather that it was not my business to scatter them. There was a dignity and completeness about the skeleton, and about its dissolution; it seemed to want exactly what was becoming of it, a return to the ground of being which the marsh is, rich solution in which old and new life are held in the suspension from which possibility arises. I left the bones together, and