Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [36]
In the night it rained, and the wind blew hard, dislodging some canes of the climbing rose from the anchors which pin them to the walls. I think the finches’ nest has been jostled; it seems more exposed, and maybe squeezed a bit, not quite so shapely. The birds are nowhere around; have they given up on this site already, subject to their implacable imperative, and moved on?
What a fragile thing a house is, though it doesn’t seem so. All the energy we poured into the house in Vermont couldn’t complete it; it was so big, and so needy, that I used to dream, even after five years, of part of the house falling away, the sloping floors gone their way at last, tumbling in the direction they’d always pined for. Or I’d dream of whole rooms I hadn’t even discovered yet—rooms which, of course, needed immediate and serious attention. By the time I was just getting to some project I’d long postponed, I’d find that something done years before needed doing again. There was barely time to enjoy that particularly homosexual pleasure, decor; there was too much work to be done. Paint peels, plaster cracks, and gardens, of course, are the most ephemeral constructions of all.
What disappears faster than a garden without a gardener?
I learned just how fast and entire the loss of a garden is when we left Vermont. The back, private part of the garden was the last thing I studied, just before we left; I stood up on the deck above that geometry of paths and raised beds and looked down into the heart of it. It was a kind of externalization of something essential in me—is that what all gardens are?—and it had anchored me, mirrored me back, held me in place. I like the psalmist’s phrase: a dwelling place; I didn’t understand how intensely that garden had become a dwelling place for my spirit until I left it. Wally found me there, holding onto the railing we’d built ourselves, its turned spindles the salvage of some Victorian porch from a little town down the road. I wanted to go, and at the same time I knew I was taking leave, that moment, of some irreplaceable part of the history of my heart.
Not that I regret that decision, or have ever done so. We stayed in Vermont a year after Wally tested positive, reeling with the news at first and then beginning our accommodation to what Wallace Stevens called “the pressure of reality.” The more reality pushes against us, Stevens said, the more the imagination is compelled to press back. He was referring to making poems, but it’s also true that our imaginations went to work on a more pragmatic level. How was this news to fit into our lives? That mortal sword that hangs over all our heads hanging now a little lower, how were we to live? Wally was fine, then, physically, but his T-cell counts (vague marker that they are) weren’t impressive ones, and we couldn’t help but imagine versions of the future. In Vermont we felt as if our reality was exactly that—ours, not a shared sense of the world but an isolating otherness. My sense of what lay ahead, should we continue to stay there, was of a narrowing darkness and solitude, an increasing struggle against increasingly difficult demands. And how, someday, was I going to get in six cords of wood by myself?
A pair of friends, Chris and Brigid, offered to buy our house. It was easier to relinquish it to them—this would be their first house, too, and they brought to the prospect of owning it great eagerness, and a palpable love for the place, difficulties and all, which was what pleased me most. This wasn’t entirely an easy house to love, ungainly and oddly laid out and,