Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [39]
At seven this morning—a clear and resonant day, an aura of freshness and possibility around everything—there was a commotion in the roses: the birds, back at work. The nest looks larger, as if they’ve gotten an early start today on reinforcing it, trying to build something capable of withstanding the wind. I’ve been out to look at it, from a distance I disciplined myself to maintain. They’ve anchored it with soil in the bottom, the action of wise engineers.
Contagious persistence: the will to inhabit, to make, out of whatever is offered, a dwelling place.
Dancing
It’s a warm afternoon and I’ve walked to town, with no real purpose in mind other than being out, among people, in the newly strengthening sun. I’ve wandered into the record shop, browsing, and found myself wanting a CD it hadn’t occurred to me to buy, a compilation of Donovan’s greatest hits. I loved Donovan when I was a teenager, his fey exoticism and what seemed to me the foreign sophistication of his picture on the back of Mellow Yellow in his pale yellow suit—from Carnaby Street? And the sandalwood-and-patchouli glow of A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, the double album from the days when he’d practiced transcendental meditation and decked himself in peacock feathers and gypsy clothes. That was when everyone was making double albums, as if all that expansiveness wouldn’t fit on a single disk. I hadn’t heard his songs in years, and reading the list of titles I had a sort of hankering for them.
Home, I put the new CD on. I’m tidying up the house, going through a pile of mail, and sorting out bills and books. And then Donovan—who sounds almost unbelievably young to me, not fey or worldly now at all, but boyish, untainted by sorrow or the corrosive powers of time—is singing a song I remember on the radio when I was in high school, a sort of stoned Zen calypso called “There Is a Mountain.” I’d bought the forty-five then, and thought the lyrics profound:
First there is a mountain
Then there is no mountain
Then there is
I’ve been moving a little to the music while I worked, stepping around the kitchen in synch with the rhythm, fussing with the pillows on the couch, and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I’ve been holding myself. When was the last time I danced?
Mostly I’ve been moving cautiously, numbly, steeled because I know, at any moment, I may be ambushed by overwhelming grief. You never know when it’s coming, the word or gesture or bit of memory that dissolves you entirely, makes it impossible, for a while, to go on. It happens every day at first, then not for a day or two, then there’s a week when grief washes in every morning, every afternoon. It comes like a seizure, and will not be denied.
This is the first time I’ve been surprised by pleasure, the body’s simple delight at being, after all this, here, still here.
Though I’m watching myself do it, and suddenly feeling self-aware almost makes me stop, I don’t quite. Grief will be back, of course, any moment now. But I also know how lovely and light this music is, how sealed off in its innocence, and how happy my body is, these few minutes, to dance.
A Visit with Bill
Each room along this fluorescent hospital corridor has about it an aura of abandonment. These doors seem as if they should be labeled not with patients’ names but with inscriptions: Shame, Suffering, Neglect, Nobody-Cares-Where-I-Am. These rooms are either starkly brilliant or entirely without light, and the men who live in them—all men here—have in common the absence of context: no personal effects, no clothes, pictures, no flowers, nothing that says, This is who I was. I use the past tense deliberately, since these men are already far along in the process of being erased. This