Friday, June 28, 2013

Communique

This is a prose-poem-essay dealie that I contributed to the zine WYRD DAZE recently...

I have seen the march of powerlines across the landscape. Neat symmetrical arrangements of shimmering steel and wire that carry lightning between two axes, two balanced ends of a ruined and withered spectrum. These are the capillaries, the bloodstreams, the veins strung taut in ribbons. City to city and house to house, stirring each convenience to vivid life and light. We've watched it all on television. 

I've seen the deepest and secretest of gray-washed winter woods laid naked and ravaged by the earth-moving blade, the rusted rumble of gears and the lingering trace of filthy oil at the edge of a future building site. Where autumn once held her orange dominion, now miles of spidery commuter suburbs with tarped-over aboveground pools and red-cedar swingsets in the yards, sacks of poisons lurking in the eaves of the garage. Each cul-de-sac a dead void where mystery had laid down sighing. I've seen the uniformity like corpses arranged in a pagan circle.

I've seen the edge of great and spreading centers of commerce, where the blinking polestar signals of radio towers jostle amidst fields of white oil tanks and grim and sterile office parks, where toxins spill from the strangled rivers into the sumac and half-submerged shopping carts of a hesitant reservoir. I've seen the boundless pouring freeways, their many-shadowed overpasses scarred with the dim graffiti of teenage malice, glaring halogens and passing whims within easy steering. I've seen the interchanges and toll plazas, the false shrubs and noisewalls, the gaping tombstone hollows of ghost-boxes and rippling vacant-grinned airdancers. I've glimpsed the flickering headlights through the hazy amputated median forests on northbound lanes at midnight. I've seen the dreary beige fields of your outlands, North Carolina. I've seen where the layers of your progress give way collapsing.

I've seen the plumes of smoke from countless streaming Superfund chimneys. I've grown within reach of your abandoned mills of brick and soot and shattered, pebbled glass. I've seen your vinyl furniture set ablaze in a meadow beside a corrugated warehouse. I've seen your hangings, your phantoms, your sense of loss and your obsessive skeleton key past. I've seen the blood and chalk of your senseless sidewalk shootings, I've seen the drugs you can't purge from your system for the minimum wage food court job interview. These halogens aren't flattering to your skin. You could see a doctor if only you had the insurance.

I've seen these soldiers bored on their toted bedrolls. I've seen these police trailing you home if your skin is a shade too brown, Alamance County. Your harrowed realm is a witch's spellcraft, a ghost at the banquet, a lingering omen, a portentous sense of dread, unspeakable nightmares half-glimpsed moving in the darkness of an unknown alley or a haunted mountaintop wood. I've seen Other Burlington, and I've seen the distant lights of her awakening. I've seen the squadrons of black southern birds racing the moon and its tangles of drifting cloudbank. You're a seance, Old North. You raise the dead wholesale and sell them off cut-rate for a mall that'll rot derelict in fifteen years if business is booming. I've seen your taxidermy. I've seen your desperate, hallowed malingering, pulse fading, pressed in glass and trapped in amber. Your history is our own. The diaries you keep are stained with trails of errant ink, an NC carved in a wax seal, moldering. Your name is light pollution. Your name is a mirror. Your name is Gomorrah. Your name is consuming without regret to fill oblivion. Your name is lurid logos and leering billboards, beckoning from the highway to the death-sprawl that lurks just beyond a discreet tree-line. Your essential entirety is outskirts and borderlands, Tar Heel. You're an abandoned car filled with dread rumors on the side of a forgotten exit, aswarm with wasps. You forget how I've seen your boarded up windows on tenements and your forgotten asylums, your overcrowded hospitals and old folks' homes. You can't keep a history like that from one of your own, friend. I've seen how your trailer parks and driving ranges wither to ash in the falling twilight.

I've waited for Shearon Harris to go red and fill the sky with pouring radioactive rain. I've seen your cars piled in flames on cloverleafs etched against the chemical sunset. I've seen your terrified jet passengers bracing for the final descent into doom. I've seen your saw-blade and your axe chip efficiently, coldly away at the marrow of our green hills and plains. I've seen your hulking ships swaying in your salted tides. You are a nondescript parking lot down an access road. You're the empty pursuit of material perfection, a sanding away of edges and of character, a gated development with high walls and identical center-hall floorplans and anonymous magnet schools arranged within easy walking distance of shopping. I've seen it all since childhood: a veil lifted, a decay and a fever and a longing and an ache. I've seen the answers to your questions. I've seen the tarnish setting in. 

And still, beneath the curled veneer, I've seen the fox, the bear, the deer, the red wolf. Still I've seen the cool and bubbling rock-hewn streams, the black and endless wetland channels. Still I've seen the swarms of pine woods navigating the valleys. We've been there with our broken technology all along. We've been there with our warbling, dying VCR, our stained and eerie Polaroids, our scratched and blurring Super 8. We've been there with our cassettes set always to 'record'.

This is your salvation. This is your invitation to the ball. Your denouement is here, North Carolina. There's no more escaping or warding it away, no turning back. Approach this final abyss within. Critical mass has been breached and surpassed. The end is already set in motion and cannot be reversed. Brace for a coming storm.

Soon, we will begin disappearing like an old-time rapture. Every mailman, every gun-happy small-town sheriff, every crooked elected official, every perpetual and lethal widow adding arsenic to the glass, every drink-addled fraternity pledge stumbling through the gutters of Chapel Hill, every sunburned crabber, every soccer mom at Briar Creek in her SUV with stick figure family enumerated proudly on her back windshield, every buzz-cut Fayetteville recruit, every Durham gang-banger, every genteel old tobacco executive in their fading antebellum mansions, every bearded vegan barista in Asheville, every Seagrove potter, every family, every man, every woman, every child. We are vanishing from the very yards where we grill on the Fourth of July in preparation for fireworks. We are vanishing from behind our rubber Halloween masks in the thick of the spirit hour. We are vanishing from Christmas dinner, from lounging in front of Thanksgiving football. We are vanishing from winter, spring, summer, fall. This is the song of our departure.

And when we lift to the ceiling of your very burnished skies, we leave not the thinnest legacy behind, no pure illumination, no cast of light to impart that we were once a people, a community, a state, a home, save perhaps for one solemn and dying voice trailing like a streamer on the faintest hint of wind, bristling through the empty streets and down the silent travel lanes below rows of dead and leaning streetlights, from ocean floor to red clay ridge, between the broken skylines. A voice that insists, plaintively and pointedly, that I have seen the end of all I've ever loved and known, and I have seen the march of powerlines across the landscape. 

Heart and hope, love and entropy. Yearning and magnetic pull. Anchors and orbits. Dawn and the new bourgeoning. Names that now can never be unspoken.

Tear every city asunder. Sow new oats over the hallowed ground of this ruin. Break apart the elevated freeways with your hands and crush every skyscraper into powdered glass. Stomp every mall flat into the earth it trampled to be born. Unearth the bones from every graveyard. Erase every sidestreet and every stadium and every cinema, every drive-thru and every satellite station and every rock-flung shore, and brush over every trail with withered leaves until it's all a white expanse on the map, unremarked upon, unremembered, gone. Snap every smokestack and spire and roofline in two. And when everything's gone, begin to build again.












Monday, June 17, 2013

Bourgeoning Summer

All of the doors in the house closed at once, 
a dread chorus of gallows trapdoors banging shut
in the wake of chilled wind
that trailed through the house
like ice particles stirred to lively animation.

The sky wallowed in its sullen, amber pall,
little drifts of gray leaves dancing away up the road,
to where the bridge swayed drunkenly with 
each hollow, booming gust, 
recoiling snake-like from the 
bright purple frost of descending lightning.

This is the kind of rain
that washes seasons away whole, 
shrieking into the maw of raw yesterdays,
all bent backwards into oblivion.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

10:37 PM, June 12th

On Burlington summer evenings
the darkness seeps in by degrees,
a silently falling veil
erasing the blue from neighborhood skies
to carve the night black,
the backyard trees bathed in the halogens
of rusted streetlights,
both etched like skeletons in the vast gloom.

This is a dark so deep
that it changes all perception,
doubles and redoubles distances
like a funhouse mirror,
conjuring unimaginable distortions.
Tiny lightning-bug beacons
stitch their invisible thread
between the stalks of stubborn timothy
by the worn back steps,
while the heat drips down from the air
like a wavering ghost of last week's rain.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters


When I was a child in the hills of western Massachusetts, I was convinced I loved summer more than any other kid in town. Summer meant watergun fights and late-night soccer matches in the meadow across Granville Road, chasing fireflies through leafy woods in the massive nature sprawl of Stanley Park, and the weekend block parties our neighborhood would throw on a few occasions each season, the thick tang of charcoal grilling and pool chlorine hanging almost solidly in the air. Despite the mosquito bites and the constant shadow realization of school letting in again soon, summer was a clear glass jar of freedom in a shapeless year. 

As I grew, I began to love summer less and less, a boy becoming a man and aging out of feverish childhood passions. Once we moved to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, summer meant endless traffic trapped in sun-sticky, brutally hot cars. It meant the occasional blithe rudeness of the tourists at whatever hellish retail outlet you spent the summer toiling for. I was never a beach kid; a part of me always yearned desperately for those cool Massachusetts summers again, likely more idyllic in my memory than they were in reality. Adulthood tends to mean a great deal of revisionist history where our younger days are concerned. Still, a halcyon glow surrounds the very thought of those summers even now as I approach thirty.

Now my cherished time of the year is fall and winter. Maybe I've just change fundamentally as a person, but as they say, you can always bundle up but you can't take your skin off to escape the heat. Winter and autumn are times to wander the orange, freshly-bare woods at Shallow Ford, to navigate endless fields of dead yellow grass beneath boundless, overcast gray skies, to wrap yourself in a sweater and drink hot chocolate while you string holiday lights on the front porch, your breath fogging in the raw chill as the freights wail through the center of town. I'm not a dark person by nature (despite the themes of much of my art), but I love the mysterious pull the colder months have. Summer is a stagnant fog of haze in comparison, and moving through its syrupy warmth simply feels exhausting. 

Perhaps I'm lucky. I've experienced passionate love for most of the year, but at different perspectives and levels of maturity throughout my life. For now though, I'm very much counting the days until it's time to carve pumpkins and build bonfires and burrow under covers once more. I'm aching for that first hint of frost in the air sometime in late August, that subtle shift of light to a more prosaic yellow that will tell me that my time is on its way to my door again. I'll try to enjoy summer in the meanwhile.

"And then it is raining 'cause Halloween is coming,
so close you can smell it right against your face."

                           -Thanksgiving, "There's No Invisible Halloween Costume That Isn't There"

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Washing Dishes In The Vast Night


Our house here in Burlington is a continuing revelation to me, a simple wonder slowly unraveling with the passing seasons. The rambling, strange design of this 1910 folly offers unending surprises and tiny, mysterious secrets to pry open. We moved here for the space; Denny wanted a larger kitchen than we had in Hillsborough, and I wanted room for recording in a more atmospheric setting, something imbued with cobwebs and a little dusty age. I had known the area from past visits (good friends attended college nearby), but the house was what drew me in, a towering old relic bound with aging gray siding and burgundy shutters, wrapped with an endless porch and skirted by an expansive, sprawling yard.

There's much to love about our large but modest home. Details leap into focus for me even as I type this post. The tarnished squares of faded white where pictures once hung on the walls, the elegant curve the staircase takes in its final steps descending into the darkness of the foyer, are all frequent reminders of the grace in past generations of residential architecture. Upstairs, the original hardwood floor is burnished and scarred, and downstairs, beautifully-carved designs in the door-frames and moldings remain, geometric shapes in white. The rooms are populated with brightly-reflecting French doors and a series of crumbling brick fireplaces, and in the yard stand three magnificent oaks withering with age.

The house is in a working-class neighborhood in Burlington, and it's admittedly not in anything but livable shape. Affordability was as much a factor as space. But where some would merely scoff at the peeling paint of the back stairs or the cracking, splintered porch-boards out front, or would roll their alarmed eyes at the corroded bathtub or the sloped warping linoleum of the kitchen floor, I find the same tarnished beauty I see in all of Burlington. This decayed manse suits me well, at least for now, until we inevitably flee to the solitude of the woods again someday, having tired of 'city' life downtown. For now, we've made this place our own, a rickety battlement against the rising tide of sprawl around the state. By clinging to our history and tenderly caring for it, we preserve it it alive and whole. 

"Ever since I have been so involved
In loving the feeling of keeping a small house warm and clean,
I'm not always aware that there are stars above stars
Just above that ceiling.

Or that the rain gushing throws the trash into the street,
Or that the wind in dark parking lots, at this moment,
Holds a leaf to the fence.
I sort of remember the world, but my small house is glowing.

A car playing music drives past the window
While I'm washing dishes in the vast night."

                                              -Mount Eerie, "Small House"