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.

As Safe As Houses

This house warps and melts like a 

wedding cake in fragrant summer,

each molded corner bleeding into 

the door-frames.

All the furniture is hemmhorraging

its stuffing, regretful and dolorous.

We could peel strips of the faded hardwood

away with our fingertips,

grasping furtively some sense

of decayed mystery beneath the boards,

where the earth meets the hearth.

The fireplace is still choked with coal dust,

and there's pale squares

where paintings once hung

in lost days of antiquity. 

Even the windows,

with their burden of busy insects and

swiftly-rusting screens,

are a reference point in glass.

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"

In The Missing Hours Of An Absent Spring...

Spring has fled from us here in Burlington, or more accurately, spring was never here to begin with. The season's simply missing from our collective experience of 2013, a blacked-out section of a classified report or an abductee's period of missing, haunted time. Winter's raw chill dissolved in a single medium-length fade into the sticky, sweltering fragrance of summer sprung early, of the lingering traces of last night's cookouts on the tepid breeze, of barely-open windows in old houses and the green, bursting fervor of plant life growing wildly. Here in Burlington, the air grows heavy and languid, a solid object to swim through, bleeding into the car like a flood while you're helplessly marooned in city traffic. The heat shimmers in its wave-like, electric haze from the power stations and the tarmac highway surfaces, lends a dream-lit quality to those void-like spaces behind the abandoned, collapsing mills, the littered vacant lots. I expect that in a similar blink, all of this will be entombed in gray autumn once more, but for now we watch the reflections of lights dance across our watermarked ceilings and try to stay cool. Half of town seems to be on vacation already, a mass evacuation though it's only May.

Last night, I took a long walk with a friend who's recent personal crises greatly required the company. He lives in Graham, the smaller but much more affluent neighboring city to Burlington and a shadow image of what this place might've been, had different choices been made. As I paced in the liquid heat through sturdy brick-ranch neighborhoods, past neatly-trimmed lawns, I realized how very distant Graham seemed from Burlington, more in a matter of stark degrees than the sum of the very few miles between them. Burlington is still unlike anywhere else I've ever been. The closest approximation I can consider, strangely, is Los Angeles. While the two cities of course couldn't be more different than, well, winter and summer, only in LA have I also felt that surreal, edge-of-the-world quality found in such abundance in central Alamance County. The difference is here, we're on the edge of nothing. We're simply quarantined, isolated. To paraphrase Jeffrey Eugenides, we're mapped by what surrounds us. The rest of the Triangle and the Triad both seem like far-off stars glimpsed from the cold surface of a dying planet. As I've said before (in interviews for the band mostly), the surface of Burlington is a thin shell covering something stranger and much more elemental beneath, a mood that's been described by some of my visiting friends as "Lynchian". You'll turn a corner here and know you've crossed that border, that threshold, and I've realized that this 'Other Burlington' has informed so much of my musical and film work that it's becoming a defining aspect of my experiences here. Denny, escaping into the placid environs of Chapel Hill for work each day, is less acclimated to Burlington's quaintly unusual atmosphere. This is a 'thin place' in every sense of the word. Sometimes you can see behind the veil here, and sometimes it's only the faintest negative glimpsed, a double exposure in warped glass.

In summer, the furious eruption of green in this city, with its cornucopia of oaks and maples, tends to hide what seems more evident in the frozen months, with the trees black and bare and the grass dead in the lots behind the railroad rights of way and in the yards of the boarded-up Victorian mansions. But one glance at the history of this place, from the heyday of the Burlington Coffin Company, to the bizarre goings-on in the monster-cursed myths of Goat Island, to the serial killer Blanche Taylor Moore and her sweet, subtle poisonings, and it's readily apparent that things are a bit different here. There's multiple levels of perception to Burlington, all of them unusual. One can miss the subtleties, or choose to overlook them in the name of more logical rationale, but you can't deny that the mood here is odd, to say the least. Underneath Burlington's mask of an ordinary Southern town are the deepest fathoms.

So, am I simply investing something unique where only another dying North Carolina mill town exists, as would be expected of any artistic nature? I don't think so. Simply, nowhere else I've known has precisely felt like this, and in a way, that's why Burlington has come to feel so much like home even in just the two busy years we've spent here. You see, I've always been the caretaker. I've been here for years, without knowing it. It existed as a shade in my mind that had yet to be lifted, and I was always fated to come here. My music's destiny, my own destiny, lies within the eerie borders of this forgotten little city. I am sure unlocking its myriad secrets will prove fascinating all throughout the years to come.