Across Causeways

I have left you behind, old ocean,

blithely erased your midnight churnings 

from down wind-tipped streets

of empty wood-panelled sandboxes, 

like typing a fence-line of black X's 

across a misspelled word on the page. 

These were summer nights

where bright-banded constellations 

seemed vast enough

to swallow our youth whole,

as we lazed drunk and bewildered

in the rickety lifeguard watch-stands. 

Or the blue mornings of February

walking to the corner for the bus,

rifles booming hollow and black

from the duck blinds out in the reeds.

Past hundreds of miles of 

snake-crawled swamp and 

woods and yawning fields,

I still wake sometimes and feel

you lapping your fragmented shore,
somewhere out in all that darkness.

Lonely Places

The wind-whistled Siberia of mall parking lot

that stands vacant and weed-strewn 

save for shopping holidays,

and where it meets vast tides of 

gray fields racing into a distant nowhere.

A pool crusted over by a billowing tarp

in the seasons of staying indoors, 

crumpled leaves clinging to the rusted cyclone fence,

the blue fabric flapping like a dazed ghost

as the gust lazily stirs its edges. 

The sense of absence between two homes, 

glancing resigned over your shoulder at 

whatever you're treading away from,

rather than a future's beckoning. 

Old Songs Revisited

Autumn is a time when a dangerous emotion tends to sneak and coil into my musings: nostalgia, that old seductive euphemism for loss and regret. Maybe it's the quality of the slanting yellow light, the sudden chill in the air and the scent of woodsmoke in the evenings. Fall is such a wistful season.

Digging through boxes still left unpacked with Denny this past weekend, I discovered some very embarrassing early attempts at song-craft, visions of teenaged cliched angst too awful and humiliating to be reprinted here. Tonight though, on a break from recording new material for my full-time project, I found myself playing some other songs of a more recent vintage, folk songs I had written for prior bands, and myself, at the turn of this last decade. Many of them are admittedly just as awful as the fifth-grade radio-metal imitations, and in hindsight I find myself very glad to be expressing myself instead through instrumental music, poetry, and photography/film these days.

Five years is a long time, and though I'm still young, I find my singing voice (which I've never cared for in the least) has changed quite a bit since these songs were written. Gone is much of the Oberstian whining, replaced with a hoarse, huskier tone. I suppose this reflects everything that has changed in the past five years of my life. These songs are lived-in in a way they weren't before, as fresh, painful gashes. And the lyrics are just too personal to share on an Internet blog, or anywhere.

When I moved to Raleigh in 2008, in the wake of an aborted college career and an emotionally turbulent relationship, I was adrift and an outsider. Looking back on the lyrics of these songs, they're confrontational and angry in a way that shocks and saddens me now. I didn't realize as a vitriolic, outspoken twenty-four year old that all that seething was masking some serious fear, a serious sense of isolation. These songs pine nakedly for a Boone that was even then vanishing, for a love that was never the right combination of personalities to last, for a youth that was as impermanent as late spring snowfall and just as tempestuous. These songs lash out at everyone around me at the time, at a new town that didn't feel like home and where I didn't feel accepted, and at my own mistakes. I didn't realize that I was the one cutting myself off, retreating on my own terms, withdrawing from the world.

Having found a partner and a love again, seeing more success than frustration at last with music, all that fear and rage seem very foreign to me. These are bitter, unpleasant songs, lyrics that poured out of me like automatic writing, that I didn't analyze for content at the time but which now speak pretty deeply to who I was circa 2008-2010. I simply hadn't remotely figured out who I was yet.

The process continues, of course.

-----

A final thought - something strange occurred to me driving back late to Burlington from elsewhere last night. This city shuts down quite dramatically at 5PM on weeknights; the traffic lights downtown turn to flashers and the streets empty as if by some wicked magic. I came to this conclusion:

Burlington is a part-time apocalypse.

ZC

October Country

This is the time of year in Burlington when the days remain as hot as July's worst sweltering waves, but the nights are suddenly crisp and cool, a sort of first glimpse of the autumn lurking just over the edge of the calendar. At night in our upstairs bedroom with the windows open, the rich tang of burning fields carries on the gentlest breeze. A hint of woodsmoke and an imagined season of axes in blackened stumps and hot cider around campfires. Halloween is already lingering in the slanting yellow light, the darkening air of our patch of North Carolina.

Driving to Charlotte a couple of nights ago for a show, it occurred to me how vast and empty the highways in our state tend to be. None of the narrow serpentine curves and headlong traffic of the northern cities, just endless vistas of fields with the occasional neon sign sprouting on steel legs above a cluster of pines. Maybe it's that touch of sadness that creeps in with the coming fall, the lingering traces of bittersweet nostalgia in the atmosphere, but our interstates seemed to me lonely roads trailing off into the ether, a compass point reached and not returned from.

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"