Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [9]
Desire I think has less to do with possession than with participation, the will to involve oneself in the body of the world, in the principle of things expressing itself in splendid specificity, a handful of images: a lover’s irreplaceable body, the roil and shimmer of sea overshot with sunlight, a handful of cherries, the texture and weight of a word. The word that seems most apt is partake; it comes from Middle English, literally from the notion of being a part-taker, one who participates. We can say we take a part of something but we may just as accurately say we take part in something; we are implicated in another being, which is always the beginning of wisdom, isn’t it—that involvement which enlarges us, which engages the heart, which takes us out of the routine limitations of self?
The codes and laws fall away, useless, foolish, finally, hollow little husks of vanity.
The images sustain.
The images allow for desire, allow room for us—even require us—to complete them, to dream our way into them. I believe with all my heart that when the chariot came for Wally, green and gold and rose, a band of angels swung wide out over the great flanks of the sea, bearing him up over the path of light the sun makes on the face of the waters.
I believe my love is in the Jordan, which is deep and wide and welcoming, though it scours us oh so deeply. And when he gets to the other side, I know he will be dressed in the robes of comfort and gladness, his forehead anointed with spices, and he will sing—joyful—into the future, and back toward the darkness of this world.
Cold Dark Deep and Absolutely Clear
A week and a few days after Wally died, my friend Michael and I stood on the shore at Hatch’s Harbor, which is just where Cape Cod Bay and the Atlantic intersect in a roiling line of watery activity called the Race. At Hatch’s Harbor the sky always seems enormous, the horizontals of dune and marsh and shoreline particularly vast and dazzling. It is especially pristine because the place isn’t easy to reach, accessible as it is only after a long walk through a fire road in the dunes, along a dike built across a huge stretch of marsh, and then round the sandy tideflats skirting a lighthouse whose foghorn tends to sound in all weathers, even the brightest sunlight. The once-manned house is operated by remote control now, the switch apparently off in Connecticut someplace.
In the water that afternoon I saw first one oddly shaped dark form, a sort of mound a few feet from the foaming edge line. It was a seal in the shallow surf, floating on his or her side, eyeing us curiously. My two dogs were with us; I think seals seem to sense them as distant but unlikely cousins, and want to study them. In a moment the watcher submerged, and then rose again a few yards away, a wet black marble bust, the perfectly erect head held with marked dignity and poise. It was joined shortly by another pair of heads. And then another pair, and then another rolling on her side, enjoying the wave of her body and the quick flip of tail. And then there were dozens of watchers, looking toward us with as much curiosity and surprise as we brought to our study of them. The alien world of the water might as well have been, for me, the other world of the spirit; I felt I was looking into the realm of the dead, which I could not enter or know very much about. I thought of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “At the Fishhouses,” in which she describes the seawater of the Nova Scotian coast as
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals…