Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [8]
Perhaps my discomfort has to do, still, with issues of desire. Wind, glimmering watery horizon and sun, the watchful seals and shimmered flurries of snow seem to me to have far more to do with the life of my spirit. And there is somehow in the grand scale of dune and marsh and sea room for all of human longing, placed firmly in context by the larger world: small, our flames are, though to us raging, essential. There is something so polite about these Sunday gatherings of tolerant Unitarians that I feel like longing and need must be set aside. Isn’t the part of us that desires, that loves, that longs for encounter and connection—physical and psychic and every other way—also the part of us that knows something about God? The divine, in this world, is all dressed up in mortal clothes, and longing and mortality are so profoundly intertwined as to be, finally, entirely inseparable.
My lover of twelve years died just last month. It astonishes me to write that sentence. It astonishes me that I am writing at all; I have not, till now, and I didn’t know when the ability to focus might come back to me. I haven’t yet been able to read, and there are many other things I haven’t even begun to approach, in the face of this still unbelievable absence. I will be sorting out and naming the things I learned from Wally for years to come, probably for the rest of my life, but here is one thing I know now.
All the last year of Wally’s life, he didn’t stop wanting. He was unable to walk, since some kind of insidious viral infection which his useless doctors didn’t seem to know the first thing about gradually took away his ability to control his body. But he wasn’t ever one of those people who let go. Oh, he did, in the sense of accepting what was happening to him, in the sense of not grasping onto what he couldn’t have, but he lived firmly in his desires. From the bed where he lived all that year he’d look out onto the street at anything in pants walking by and be fully, appreciatively interested. I never for a minute felt hurt by this or left out; it wasn’t about me. It was about Wally’s way of loving the world. I think in his situation I would have been consumed by frustration and a sense of thwarted desire, but he wasn’t. Because his desire wasn’t about possession, and his inability to fulfill it wasn’t an issue; it was to be in a state of wanting, to be still desiring beauty and grace and sexiness and joy. It was the wanting itself that mattered.
A couple of months before Wally died we heard about a couple in the city, one of whom was ill, who needed to give up their little dog, since they felt they couldn’t take care of him.
Wally talked and talked about this until it became clear that what he really wanted was for Dino to come to live with us. We already had a dog, Arden, a calm black retriever with a meditative, scholarly disposition, but Wally had his heart set on a new dog who’d sleep next to him and lick his face.
The day that I went to Manhattan to pick up Dino, Jimi and Tony changed their minds; they weren’t ready to let him go. Wally was so disappointed that I went to the animal shelter with the intention of finding a small, cuddly dog who’d fit the bill.
What I found was a young golden retriever with enormous energy, a huge tongue, and a phenomenal spirit of pleasure and enjoyment. He didn’t just lick Wally’s face, he bathed his head, and Wally would scrinch up his face and then grin as though he’d been given the earth’s brightest treasure.
Sometimes late at night he’d tell me about other animals he wanted to adopt: lizards, a talking bird, some fish, a little rat.
I don’t know many men who would want a new dog, a new pact with domestic life, with responsibility, with caring