Of course there is no consolation, for the dreadful fact of a death. Nothing makes it right. Nothing can remedy that absence, that break in the continuity of things. Nothing can fill the space Wally occupied in my life; nothing takes his place.
On an absolute level he is gone, utterly, and that absence rings at the core of every one of my days, the aftermath of a struck bell.
And yet. And yet.
There are these gifts, these perceptions or moments or aspects of experience which make it possible, desirable, to continue. Any consolation can and does dissolve, any day, into the lake of grief, that liquid realm where all bright or solid things darken and disappear. One does not lose—one does not want to lose, entirely—grief.
We live, instead, into, toward a different relation to loss, a shifting perspective: the grief not as large and overwhelming, not every day, not erasing, not entirely, what there is to praise.
And what is left, when you’ve lost what you loved most, to praise?
A Metaphor
A portion of a letter, from the poet Alfred Corn:
February 19, 1994
…What I’m working up to is to say how sorry I was to hear about Wally. I didn’t know him, but I’ve heard what a tremendous person he was, and I think I have some idea what you must be feeling. When I call up pictures of friends (none of them lovers) lost, a terrible ache comes over me, so much so that it has to go away on its own, there isn’t much by way of remedy that I can do. I remember a letter of Henry James where he said that in times of great grief it was important to “go through the motions of life”; and then eventually they would become real again. Our great enemy Time is also on our side in these matters. And then you have a great resource in your art, which is also a friend and inseparable. I’ve been trying to write, myself, a poem about those ancient Japanese ceramic cups, rustic in appearance, the property at some point of a holy monk, one of the few possessions he allowed himself. In a later century, someone dropped and broke the cup, but it was too precious simply to throw away. So it was repaired, not with glue, which never really holds, but with a seam of gold solder. And I think our poems are often like that gold solder, repairing the break in what can never be restored perfectly. The gold repair adds a kind of beauty to the cup, making visible part of its history…
What was can’t be restored; I can neither have Wally back in the flesh, nor return to the self I inhabited before his death. The vessel’s not cracked but broken, all the way through, permanently.
The break, from now on, is an inescapable part of who I am, perhaps the inescapable part. Hasn’t it become my essential definition, my central fact: I loved a man who died?
But who can live, day by day, in pieces? Loss shatters us, first, but then what?
Alfred’s metaphor offers a possibility: to honor the part of oneself that’s irreparable. Not to apologize for it, disguise it, not try to mend it in any seamless way. Studying the cup, the viewer might see the rupture first; to fill the crack with gold means to allow the break prominence, to let it shine.
Broken, ongoing, we see at once what it was and what it is. Wearing its history, the old cup with its gilt scars becomes, I imagine, a treasure of another sort, whole in its own fragmentation, more deeply itself, veined with the evidence of time.
A Gift from Bill
Bill died late in the spring, weeks after our visit—at home, amazingly; after the long hospital siege, he’d been allowed some peaceful weeks in his own surroundings, among his own things. And he took care of those things, picking out gifts for people, directing Phil to wrap them.
When Phil came down to Provincetown in the summer, I hadn’t seem him since the wake, which was just the extravaganza of white flowers Bill had ordered. The trunk of his car was full of gifts for various people, wrapped in bright paper and bows.
Phil had an alarming story. During the funeral service—its audience half Bill’s gay friends and half his Catholic family—Phil had told the story of the green chenille robe, and a tale, characteristically Bill, of how once Bill had played a dress-up game with some very young relatives, nephews or nieces, who were expressing confusion about gender. “Are you a man or a woman?” they’d asked.
“I’m a drag queen,” Bill had answered.
Half the congregation had loved this story; half had not been amused. Phil found, suddenly, that the emotional temperature shifted; welcomed by Bill’s family for years, he was suddenly given dozens of cold shoulders. When he confronted Bill’s mother, after days of this, he learned it was the story that had turned the tide.
“Why,” she asked, “did you have to tell people about that?” Meaning, of course, why did you have to tell everyone my son was gay, why did you have to talk about it? Meaning, if my son wasn’t gay he’d still be alive.
Things changed quickly then. Phil had expected to continue living, at least for a while, in the house the two of them had shared, though Bill owned it. But in two weeks time the house was up for sale, and Phil, in the whirlwind of grief, was also separating their possessions, packing up his things, displaced.
A horrifying story, and it made me grateful for Wally’s family, who’ve expressed nothing but gratitude for the way he was taken care of. Even Jimmy, whose disappearance from our lives rankled me so deeply, said to me at the memorial service, “Thank you for taking care of my brother.” And everyone’s understood that I still don’t feel like cleaning out the attic, sorting out Wally’s collection of souvenirs. There’s so much there, more than I can keep, things I know his family will want to have.
Bill was wise, to make decisions about those things he wanted to give his friends. And there’s something deeply affecting about this gift, across the divide between worlds; here I am, walking back from Phil’s car down Commercial Street, carrying in my arms this cheerful package presented to me across the widest gulf in the world. Unbridgeable gap, and yet it’s bridged all the time, as gifts pour back to us from the dead: objects full of evocative memory, like the contents of this box, Bill’s two-handled blue-and-white Wedgwood cream soup cups, just the thing for serious entertaining, and of course he knew I’d treasure them.
Things fill up with us, they carry across time their human store.
And then gestures. Phrases. Ways of seeing the world. Moments so entirely full of the presence of someone gone; an image, an event, the sudden recognition of a quality essentially, unmistakably theirs.
The china cups, mementos of a time when people actually required something distinct in which to serve cream soups, relic of a sort of gentility, a pleasure in providing a kind of perfection for guests. Bill.
Walking in the evening, along the shore of an Italian lake, under a row of pollarded trees, still bare in the early spring, the line of old iron street lamps curving along the balustrade, glazed in the mist and doubled on the still surface of the water, I think Lynda.
In a shop window, in Milan, the most exquisite food I’ve ever seen, far too beautiful for anyone to eat, a perfection of aspics and gleaming patés, canapés, and little delights resembling not real flowers but glass ones, the gorgeous artifices of Venetian chandeliers: a heaven of display. Wally.
A girl in a blue carnival dress, yards of it, and a snowy mask, with softly luminous, silvery pigeons perching on her shoulders and arms. Wally.
An outdoor market, in Bellagio, where a vendor’s constructed a wall of birdcages, just across from a vendor of candy, the sheen of the parakeets and finches mirroring the colors of the sugary treats in their wooden bins: little blue seahorses, apple-green sour balls, a universe of diminutive produce, in marzipan. Wally.
We couldn’t keep the dead out of the present if we wanted to. They’re nowhere to be found, and firmly here, now. While this is a source of pain, memory’s double-edged sword at once wounds and offers us company, interior companionship which enriches and deepens the dimensions of every day.
In an Italian erbolario, a fragrance shop full of herbal essences and essential oils, I find a bottle of cologne, a scent called vetiver, one that Wally loved. I lift the tester bottle and spray a cloud of the stuff onto my wrist: the strongest, purest scent of vetiver I’ve ever known, and Wally’s body comes flooding back to me, the scent of his collar, some Boston morning when he’s going to work, tying a dotted pink bow tie. In the cloud of the scent is how young he is, how handsome, something hopeful about the morning, something deeply resonant and sexy in the magnetic pull of his body, his physical and emotional warmth. Gleaming chestnut eyes, like good leather or the lustrous wooden case of a violin. So I buy the bottle, and choose days when I want to feel him, physically, that scent close, intimate as skin.
Even the word, vetiver, full of him.
They are a way of being in the present, a way of paying attention, these moments when I think, this is so Wally.
Or, Wally would love this.
Times when I suddenly say, Oh, babe, look at that.
When I say to the open air, to the morning, to the ether, Now what?
Making
I found myself, without being able to help it, in a study of my beloved wife’s face, systematically noting the colors.
When the world shatters, what does a writer do?
David, after Lynda’s death, writes poem after poem, bracing, fierce, bitter. My friend Patrick, after the death of his lover Chris, goes into the studio and paints ten hours a day; that work, sheer physical concentration, is what he can do.
The three of us are people who’ve always depended on our work as a means of negotiating difficulty. A vessel for feeling, an arena in which we give shape to emotion and see it reflected back to us. How lucky, not to have the ability to work desert us. Work is our intangible property, one thing that we individually control. One thing that doesn’t disappear.
This book begins as separate essays, pieces written for collections about AIDS and about religion, written because someone invited me to write them. But soon I was impelled, soon I was writing for myself. Writing, in a way, to save my life, to catch what could be saved of Wally’s life, to make form and struggle toward a shape, to make a story of us that can be both kept and given away. The story’s my truest possession and I burnish and hammer it and wrestle it to make it whole. In return it offers me back to myself, it holds what I cannot, its embrace and memory larger than mine, more permanent.
Always, always we were becoming a story. But I didn’t understand that fusing my life to the narrative, giving myself to the story’s life, would be what would allow me to live.
Bitterness
Gridlock in New York; the President’s in town and his cordon of vehicles has Fifth Avenue closed, so there’s some kind of chain reaction all the way to La Guardia. The taxi driver wants to take an alternate route, so after I agree we wind up on some side street in a particularly beat part of Queens. This would probably help matters except that it seems every other taxi driver in the universe has had the same idea, so that this sad little retail neighborhood with its on-the-skids businesses and wildly graffitied walls is totally choked with yellow taxis, all of them idling and cursing and champing at the bit. Nobody’s moving.
Which allows me a really good look at the guy on the corner, a middle-aged black man in shabby clothes, too many layers of them for the weather. He’s standing right on the curb, rocking back and forth a little, surveying the air above the cabs, the gridlock, me, and when he speaks, loud as a street preacher, his judgment seems to take in us all.
“The world,” he says, “is shit.”
It makes me laugh, as well as scaring me a little—he’s right outside my window. But all he wants to do is pronounce.
And in fact I know how he feels. Because grief has taught me that bitterness is itself a strange kind of consolation, that clear-eyed, sober bleakness that sees right through the sentiments of consolation, that knows better than all the things that fail to console. Time, for instance; my friend Renate, her husband dead three years, saw the wind rocking the chair on the deck where her husband used to like to sit, and the movement of the empty chair tore her apart; she felt, in fact, that her grief had gotten worse with the passage of time. Is the way that time “heals” us simply that it encourages us to turn away?
Or memory. People love to say, “Your pain will fade and you will be left with beautiful memories.” But my memories are also a narrative of pain and of diminishment, and that history’s vivid to me, too.
Sometimes all that would help would be to allow myself to feel ferocious, to feel like a raging fire burning up the false offerings of consolation, burning right at the dark heart of things. We need, sometimes, to consign it all to darkness. We need to look at the world and proclaim it shit.
Whose ignorant words, says the voice in the whirlwind in Job, smear my design with darkness?
Ours. Because everything around us races toward disappearance. Our brief moment’s a flash, an arcing flare which itself serves to illuminate the face of death.
Aren’t we always on the verge of vanishing? Isn’t the whole world nowhere’s coast?
Sometimes all that helps is a deep, bracing breath of emptiness.
The Present
I’m writing in the wild glamour of an early Italian spring, smoke of olive wood drifting up the hill from the grove. This is a world of fragrance: Parma violets, in the shade of the woods, and on days it rains something like eucalyptus, a camphory, resinous scent floating among the trees. Small-cupped yellow narcissus, on the sunny banks. The armoire in my room gives out a deep, contained smell, decade after decade of wools and silks, ancient sachets, long quiet hours when the sun’s poured in through the tall windows and heated the redolent wood till it releases something of itself into the atmosphere.
Today is the first of March; I’ve come here for a month to work in a grand old villa hundreds of steep cobbled steps up the hill from the village of Bellagio. My room is a buttery Naples yellow, thick walls pierced by two windows and french doors opening on to a balcony. My first day, my first moment alone in the room, I opened the doors and stepped out onto the stone shelf suspended above the steep switchback paths of rosemary and lavender, above the green-black cypresses flinging themselves vertically toward heaven, above the jigsawed rose-tiled roofs of the village, above the softly luminous hazed expanse of the lake and its distant mountains, behind their smoky blue veils—a landscape like the background in a Leonardo.
How could one not, in that moment, be completely absorbed in the present? What possesses us like the present does, when we give ourselves to it completely?
And then I realized, on that steep little ledge with its lace of iron railing, that this time I didn’t imagine myself falling, had no desire, now, to jump. There was too much in the world to see, too much I wanted to pour myself into, to encounter and absorb, too much I wanted to do.
The present begins to hold a possibility, in its thin, luminous edge. It suggests and supports a future.
I want to know how the story of my life will turn out.
Dogs
Dogs, in a way, are the present. Animals are infinitely attentive to now, wholly present with what’s in front of them. Entirely themselves, without compromise or dissembling. Pure directness of being, the soul right in the eyes, brimming to the edges.
Arden and Beau: heart’s companions, good boys, eager, steady, always exactly where they are.
And what is right in the present, at this moment’s fresh edge, also seems to lead right into the next moment. Last month, with Michael at the animal shelter, I sat in a pen while a dozen puppies climbed over and around us, all eagerness to be just where they were, these dozen new beings come into the world of time, to follow each moment into the next, along the arc that passing through time makes. In those almost identical faces, eyes becoming equal to the light, I couldn’t miss it: desire for the next moment, and the next, one at a time, each entirely attended to.
Heaven
Ongoingness, vanishing: the world’s twin poles.
Each thing disappears; everything goes on.
The parts pour into nowhere, the whole continues.
And to be nowhere is to be in heaven, isn’t it, in the boundless, loose from the limits of time and space?
Isn’t the whole world heaven’s coast?
Coherence
In his autobiography Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes an instance of coherence, the way a book of matches appears as a pivotal image a number of times, in very different contexts, in the writer’s life. Delighted, he finds the patterning and coherence of art showing itself in experience, in memory. He writes, “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”
So we become our stories.
Driving to school, the autumn after Wally’s death, I was thinking of something Rena had told me; Wally’s therapist had become my friend, the bond between us beginning in our common affection for him, but opening swiftly into affection for each other. In a meditation, she’d seen Wally coming to her on a great white winged horse, a Pegasus.
So I remembered the blue tattoo of Paolo the nurse, that winged horse that Wally had loved imprinted on a biceps he’d admired.
And then I remembered something I’d completely forgotten, something Rena didn’t know. Years ago, when Wally and I first met, we had all kinds of endearments for each other, silly little names we liked to play with. The name for him I liked best, Lord knows where I got it, was Skyhorse.
Wind from my love’s wings: beautiful shape, threading through a life and afterward, making things whole.
Like Beau and the seals. A year from that first difficult encounter, when he bedeviled the poor sick creature beached high on the edge of the dunes at Race Point, we walked that long fire-road path past the marsh where Wally’s ashes lie. (There—glittering beside those rocks where we stood—fragments of shell? chips of bone? Isn’t that the point, not to know?)
When we reached the shore he skirted the surf, sniffing at the breaking hemline of foam, and then looking out toward the source of that wild scent he spotted a dozen black heads eyeing him, riding on the crests and troughs of the waves, necks craned up to study the land-creature, brother (cousin?) from the other element. And Beau went into the water, intent, pure purpose. The seals didn’t budge. He floated six feet away from the first of them, head to head, studying. Then with a splash of tail the seal vanished, only to reappear a little farther out among the other heads.
Beau was, plainly, enchanted. His aim was play; he swam with abandon into the pod, which continued to await him and then dive, the game continuing, all of them moving farther out.
Until my golden friend was suddenly one of a flock of little heads some ways out from shore, and fear swept over me. How far would he go? Capable of intense passions, utterly single-minded, Beau might simply keep swimming, and what were the currents there? Would he know when he was too tired to go on?
When I could barely see the heads, the black dots of them indistinguishable from distant floating birds, I panicked, standing in the edge of the water myself and shouting his name.
I said to the air, Wally, bring him back. And then I couldn’t see any heads at all, not even that single one that had no place beneath the surface of the waves.
And just as I am praying and thinking I can’t do this, I can’t bear it, I can do it if I have to, don’t make me do it, having said yes he might disappear, my dog might simply walk into the sea and not walk out, I see this sleek little arrow shape coming in my direction, the golden fur dark now with salt water, intent on coming back to me.
On shore he’s joyous, more than half-possessed. Am I foolish for having been terrified when he’s an embodiment of pure delight, having been out there in the strangest of worlds, swimming for half an hour among a tribe he recognizes, though it tumbles in an alien medium? Well, I love him; I want him with me, and yet there’s something haunting and perfect about this, too. I think of what Jung said someplace, about children acting out the unconscious wishes of their parents; has Beau been swimming in the wild salt waters of my desire, really, out there among the somersaulting forms unfettered by gravity’s constraints?
Perhaps there isn’t one meaning to make of this story, of the seal’s apparitions and returns, the round of images that a life offers. Maybe only that we aren’t done with seals; the coherence of the story sweeps us up, stitches and braids the parts of a life together in terror and in joy. How much it helps to think that coherence might be given to us, might emerge from things themselves; perhaps our work is to recognize it.
Mystery
We don’t know where the dead are. But it’s just as true, finally, that we don’t know where we are. More things in heaven and earth, madam, than even a lifetime of experience in Abalone, Arizona, could avail you of.
Whatever this being of ours is, in its depth and complexity, we see only a little of it, and that little bit is too much for us, incomprehensible. If we know so little of ourselves, what could we hope to know about the dead?
In not-knowing, hope resides.
Sex
The comfort and actuality of the body is more poignant, underlined, when we know that the body can only comfort so much, that it will not stay. Sex is a way of entering the present, of moving through this moment’s offerings toward the next. Lust as hope: my dick kept me alive.
And sex is an acknowledgment of the mystery of flesh, its dimensionality and weight. In touch and touch, feeling the limits of the body with our hands, testing its boundaries.
Aretha Franklin
This voice says, No matter what, I’m here, I hold up, I carry on. And I am not suffering powerlessly; I take charge of what I can, I claim and shout myself, I hold forth, I hold on, take from me what you will. And the song that I make out of my continuing itself sustains.
Longing
No matter what, I want more.
I’m driving on the Cape, listening to our local community radio station, a volunteer effort that is sometimes charmingly amateurish, sometimes annoying dull, occasionally terrific. Today they’re playing a syndicated gay and lesbian news program, homos all over the world. Here’s a story about newly legalized gay and lesbian marriage in Sweden; at a Stockholm ceremony, couples are exchanging vows, then whooping it up in celebration.
And before I know what hits me, I’ve burst into tears.
Now I have all kinds of political positions about this. I am not at all sure I like the institution of marriage—look at the difficult, calcified relationships all around us, the predetermined meanings and associations such a sanctioned union places on a couple—and I don’t really know, intellectually, that I think this heterosexual model’s a good one for gay couples to follow. I turned down an opportunity to edit a book, a compilation of poems and quotations for people to use in commitment ceremonies and the like, because I just wasn’t convinced it was a notion I really supported. Didn’t we gain from having to make up our own rules, renegotiate and understand our own relationships day by day, year by year?
And yet, hearing these shouts and cheers, my ideas go right out the window. I’m crying because I wish I could have married Wally, because I’ll never be able to now. Rationally I know that a ceremony and a piece of paper don’t change a thing; we wouldn’t have been closer, our connection deeper.
But I want it anyway, I want more. Isn’t that what we’d want to say of any relationship, I’d have been right there for more, I’d have wanted more?
Whirlwind
This is what happened, my last massage with M.
I was still in pain then, didn’t yet feel I’d begun to heal. (I remember, exactly, the day I knew I had turned the corner. It was weeks later, in a friend’s cottage, on Long Island, a little studio on a cove which curves inward from the Sound. I’d had days of sleep, reading, walking, more sleep, a sense of restoration, unhurriedness, a luxury and liberty of time. Easy days, the dogs wandering in and out. The day I was to leave, getting ready, picking up the place and stowing things in the car, I suddenly noticed that I didn’t hurt. Not with the deep sense of woundedness, the aching fragility way down in the joints. And that knowledge lifted my spirits; I began to feel I had possibilities in front of me again. A few nights later, lying on the sand at Head of the Meadow, a wide Atlantic beach, my head toward a great blond tangle of driftwood, a twisted trunk polished the sheen and hue of moonlight, suddenly I felt so awake, such a sense of freedom of all I could do. How long had it been since I’d felt like that?)
But that was all in the future still. On M.’s table I am fragile, unmended.
He begins with a sort of passive yoga, moving my body into various postures for lengthening, stretching out my spine. I feel pleasure in those movements, even though they also hurt a little, frighten me a bit; couldn’t he really hurt me, if I let go too much, or moved the wrong way?
I guess I can’t be hurt, really, relaxed as I’m becoming, but there’s that fear. Surely part of the stiffness in my back is fear, yes? Afraid to be too fluid, to be carried away.
I’m thinking about holding on, about Wally’s body. Tension in my arms, resistance. Thinking I didn’t want to let his body go, shouldn’t have let him go.
M. has me begin a cycle of strange breathing—rapid short inhalations, then holding my breath, expelling it. I do this again and again, the pace increasing, the pitch of my breathing faster, harder, his directions increasingly quick, pointed, intense. And then I hold the breath, and squeeze around it as hard as I can, everything—arms, shoulders, chest, legs, face—everything utterly clenched, as small and tight and singular a point of tension as my body can make, held as long as I can.
And then I let it go.
It feels like exploding, like being born, like breaking apart into a field of stars.
My body has fallen open—arms extended, legs spread, a complete relinquishment—but I feel as if I’m still opening out, extending on beyond the limits of my body; I am spreading out and out, I don’t think there’s any limit to how far I will go. I’m making sounds, I’m crying, sometimes loud, tears, laughter, groaning. Sometimes I’m thrashing, overtly, and other times what is rippling through me is the slightest wave inside a muscle.
It goes on and on, the self thinning and spreading like spilt oil, endless, beyond any notion of boundary.
I’m hardly myself now, but a great wide field.
And I think, God is there, or, there is God. I know, through and through. Great grief, great god; where there is one, there is the other.
And I think, all along I’ve been this, have been part of this great intimacy and light, that immense kindness that was holding me, supporting me, but I hadn’t been able to let myself know it. And I’m laughing and weeping at the idea that I had to be forty to find this out. I’m thinking how much love there’s been in my life, how much suffering—my mother, my father, Wally, Lynda—and how we didn’t know who we were, through the pain, that even that was a part of God.
My hips are vibrating; that’s the space, I think, where my doubt has been. And that space is being filled now with this warm loving energy that is healing my body. I know then I’m going to heal, and I feel the increasing fire of a kind of intense vibration, in my belly and chest, energy circling around in me.
A whirlwind.
I hear the border of its enormous, rushing roar.
How long did I stay there?
In a while, in no time, I’m dimly aware of M. on the other side of the room. Slowly, I’m coming back to myself. He says something vague, and after another long time I’m opening my eyes, I’m slowly sitting up, standing up, stretching. M’s sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette. It feels so good to stand, feeling my weight balanced on both my legs, my body alive, flexible, light, the life moving in me.
That night I sleep deeply, insensate; the next day I’m still sleepy, a bit sore, sense my body changing, emotion floating up out of nowhere, little tensions coming and going in my muscles, the strange sensation of having been swept up, set down again.
It wasn’t that I was healed, right then; the muscles in my spine, my unhappy disk still had its course to run, its process to move through. But something essential, something that reshapes a life had happened to me. How can I explain, moving into that territory where language fails? What have I been doing, through all this story, but moving closer to the unsayable’s edge?
I had risen—in the three hours I’d later learn I’d lain on M.’s table—to a kind of awareness above the everyday, above the individual forms of loss and longing, desire and grief, toward a great, benign indifference, an indifference which is the force of life itself. This is one of the paradoxes at the heart of the world: the Whirlwind is indifferent, but this indifference is utterly, profoundly good.
The Universe doesn’t care about Job’s suffering, and will not intervene. And the Universe loves Job with the intensity and tenderness with which everything in the world is held. It’s Job’s vision which is limited, our human eyes which can’t apprehend the design, the sense of it. So that when Job cries out against all the grief his life has brought him, the Voice from the Whirlwind says to him:
Who is this whose ignorant words
smear my design with darkness?
That design—ferocious wisdom, implacable light, time’s ineluctable unfolding—is too large and brilliant for us to see, though sometimes we can feel the edge of the storm.
After that, I went back to seeing Glen, the sweet, familiar masseur I visit from time to time, who makes me feel relaxed and calm, in my body, in the daily world.
Luckier
This is the story I’ve been saving.
A week and a few days after Wally died, I took the dogs to walk at Hatch’s Harbor, along the long dike that leads across the salt marsh out toward the lighthouse and the far point.
February must have just begun, and the sky was poised on the exact cusp of a storm, half a chilly, bright winter blue and half a billowing dark line of snow clouds. How can something full of so much whiteness be so black? Is it the sheer density of what’s contained inside the cloud, worlds upon worlds of snow, which will soon disperse into a perfect, rhythmic scattering, going on and on for hours?
I left the house in sunlight, but by the time I got to the turnout beside the fire road the horizon was layered with deepening bands and swirls of charcoal, grayish violet, smoky black. The distant line of dunes, out across the marsh, was still sun-struck, gilded, a glowing bar beneath the expanse of darkened heaven. Under the storm, that radiance seemed intensified, alluring.
Walking along the narrow road, through the scrub of the low dune lands, then out onto the dike bisecting the marsh, I kept my eyes—like a pilgrim—on that band of hills. I found myself thinking of Whitman, in particular of the part of “Song of Myself” that begins
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands,
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
What I could remember of the poem began to unroll in my head, with its long-lined marching cadences, its plain-spoken but encantatory, biblical music. In the secondhand college edition of the poem I still read, some long-ago student wrote next to these lines, “Isn’t it grass?” which I suppose must be a marker of the demarcation between the poetic sensibility and its pragmatic opposite. For Whitman, plainly, it is not enough to say it’s grass. He spins out a stunning series of metaphors, guessing about its nature; is it “the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven”? Or “the handkerchief of the Lord,” dropped in order to make us notice the embroidery of the owner’s name? Or is the grass a hieroglyph of democracy, growing among all equally, regardless of race or social position?
And then Whitman drops the poem’s bombshell, in an image whose yoking of the lovely and terrible still shocks, after a hundred and forty years: “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”
He imagines, joyously, the origins of the grass in the bodies of dead young men, old people, babies, mothers. It is a meditation both literal (the buried dead are pushing up “so many uttering tongues”) and figurative, and it moves Whitman to a question, the core question of our lives, which he answers, in the swift and assured conclusion, with an almost unimaginable authority.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere.
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if there ever was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it…
I’d been walking with my head down, crying, feeling my way through my shaky memory of the poem. I hadn’t read it in years; I don’t know where it came from, in my memory, what triggered my recall. The lines, what I could recapture of them, felt like company, like the steadying arm of a companion, a voice of certainty. I was putting one foot in front of the other, not looking up, trying to focus on the words, and I came to the poem’s end, those lines I had been traveling toward as surely as I had been walking here, to the end of the dike just before the high sun-washed dunes began.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.
And then I looked up, into the face of a coyote.
He was standing only a little ways from the dike, perfectly still, eyeing us with a calm and frank curiosity, and he was utterly beautiful—big, full-bodied, not the scrawny creature of the night supposed to haunt local garbage cans, carrying off the occasional cat, but thick-furred, gleaming, the tips of each gray and blond hair dipped in sunlight. His eyes were golden, magnetic, inescapable. There was a moment when we all stopped—the dogs, the coyote, myself—and the world seemed in absolute suspension, nothing moving anywhere, everything centered around the fixity of our mutual gaze.
I thought, It’s a wolf, a timber wolf, and then thought no, there are no wolves here, it’s a dog. But no dog looks like that, or stands alone with that kind of authority and wildness. Then I thought, It’s one in the afternoon on Cape Cod and I’m staring at a coyote.
Then, from nowhere, I thought, He’s been with Wally, he’s come from Wally. I knew it as surely as I knew the lines of the poem. This apparition, my—ghost, was it? spirit animal? real creature carrying the presence of my love? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I’ve never seen one in the middle of the day before or since, and never been so frankly studied from the other side of wildness, from a world I cannot enter. Like my seals, the coyote stared back at us, and I could imagine in that gaze Wally’s look toward home—his old home—from the other world: not sad, exactly, but neutral, loving, curious, accepting. The dead regard us, I think, as animals do, and perhaps that is part of their relationship; they want nothing from us; they are pure presence, they look back to us from a world we can’t begin to comprehend. I am going on, the gaze said, in a life apart from yours, a good life, a wild life, unbounded.
The coyote was, for me, a blessing: different from what anyone supposed, and luckier. That night my friend Mekeel would dream of a coyote wandering the rooms of her house, a powerful and sleek animal who had come to bring her a single word: Safe. In the weeks and months after, in the stunned absence, in the hopeless hours, in the immobilized ache those are the words I’d reach for: lucky, safe. I think it was this visitation, this story, that most sustained me. The story itself, the image, not what the image means. I don’t know what it means, still, only the potent presence and consolation of the animal body, the gaze across the gulf of otherness. To those eyes I would return, over and over: different, and luckier.
But I didn’t know that yet. I turned to look at the dogs—both of them poised, perfectly still—and turned back just in time to see the coyote loping away, though at a little distance he was suddenly gone.
No watching him take off across marsh and dune; he’s vanished. Then Beau takes off after him, my inexhaustible golden rambler who’ll chase till he drops—but he merely circles and sniffs the place where the figure has been, and looks into the distance, and does not try to follow, as if he knows the chase is hopeless, that what he’d seen was somehow beyond him, unpursuable.
And I’m suddenly stumbling ahead, toward the stripe of sunlight that remains, gilding the dune between us and the sea beneath a sky entirely given over now to violet darkness. When the snow starts, will my coyote be out there someplace, leaping, nipping at the spinning flakes? Or is he not of this world at all, but a creature of the spirit’s coast, passing back and forth between elements and worlds—messenger, emblem, reminder? Whatever he is, he’s gone, and the dogs and I have turned up the slope of dune which will lead us to the sea.
We have walked into that golden band of light I’ve been watching. A wild and bracing wind is blowing off the Atlantic, and suddenly the biting air’s alive with big white flakes swirling in a shock of sunlight, and I’m alive with a strange kind of joy, stumbling up the dune into the winter wind, my face full of salt-spray and snow.