Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [32]
Kind death? How can we know?
From this walk I bring home one thing: a little lavender bottle—maybe a medicine bottle, something that held once a tincture or essential oil. It’s a mystery; purpled, no doubt, because the lead in the glass has turned in the sun, but completely unscathed by the sand, as transparent as the flesh (does that term apply?) of the jellyfish. Out here Coke and beer bottles suffer a sea change, ground in a week into something lovely, coming to resemble the element they join (and were made of) like my unlucky dolphin. So why has this old bottle survived so clear you can see the bubbles in the glass, the seams where the molten stuff was pressed into a metal mold?
My jellyfish, my dolphin skull, and the one object I can actually keep, my lavender bottle: souvenirs in a cabinet of memory, to be saved, arranged like the contents of a Cornell box. Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain.
One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They haven’t all emerged yet, but new circles tattoo the water, here and there, a coppery red. When the wind lifted their edges, each would reveal a little shadowy spot, a dot of black which seemed to flash on the water, and so across the whole surface of the pond there was what could only be described as the inverse of sparkling; a scintillant blackness. Shining blackly, black but rippling, lyrical: the sheen and radiance of death-in-life.
Is that my work, to point to the world and say, See how darkly it sparkles?
House Finches
Spring has opened its big green hands.
Yesterday I noticed that there was actually shade, beautiful greenish shade, under the box-alder tree beside my kitchen. The shadow of leaves appeared against the white clapboards of my neighbor’s garage; how long since I’ve seen the shadow of leaves, one of those things that vanish all winter, though we seldom notice that they’ve gone until their reemergence. The first buds of the three-foot crabapple I planted three summers ago have opened.
But the new season’s surest evidence is the presence of two house finches, little rose-throated gray birds who’ve begun to nest in a climbing rose that scrambles up the wall beside my bedroom window. All morning they perched on the points of the fence pickets, threads of straw and grass hanging from their beaks, before they’d dart out of view. Going out to the garden, later, to take the dogs out for a noontime walk in the woods, there was a hurried rustle and then two arcs so quick as to be almost unseeable out of the thickening green of the rose’s tumble of briers. There, half-made, was a fragile cup of ocher, its form apparent even though it wasn’t yet solidly built, light still shining through the bowl which would, in time, support the eggs.
House finches: I love the warmth and domesticity of the name, and their habit of nesting up against walls, in any sort of shelter or pocket that will protect them. The first ones came from China, fifty years ago, brought to New York City as pets; freed, they established themselves in the East across a territory that grows wider over the years. I’ve known them before, and probably that’s part of why they seem to me the real heralds of spring, their appearance that announcement