Afterimage

You and I, we've known the feeling

of stumbling across black and depthless woods

towards where a fire still churns listless smoke

into a pallid, dusky sky, 

chairs left empty moments before,

some tipped over as if in sudden flight.

Or, the lasting sense of disturbance

after all the players have left 

the baseball field,

and the last machine having towed its burden 

of shattered wreckage from

the cold nightmare of the highway accident. 

A bare intuition that something has happened

just moments before your graceless intrusion, 

now left haunted and lingering in

currents of force at the unsettled margins. 

This is what Burlington feels like in November.

Early October In Burlington

Gold-washed autumn has descended these hills 

like some conjured bit of wicked magic, 

stilling the green-wreathed leaves in their festive sway

to send them sailing to a colder soil;

they gather littered in storm drains and 

at the edges of driveways,

crisp and crackling.

Night-dark steals in a little earlier than before,

and the highways clear of all vacation traffic

as if an alarm has sounded somewhere,

indicating swift retreat.

These later hours stay tinged by woodsmoke and rust,

curling through the parted curtains

of upstairs bedrooms, 

as the earth slumps away from the sun. 

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.

Pines

Hello folks,

I have a new instrumental folk side project called Pines. You can listen to the first song over at our new blog, www.pinesofnc.blogspot.com, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pinesnc

More soon, thanks!

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.

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.

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"

An X On A Photograph

In forgotten days you were suspended in the air,

a haze in the void that moved like waves of thick glass.

Between yawning pines you hovered, curse-like,

a portent unremarked on but witnessed

in side-cast glances and anxious shuffles homeward.

There was a gravitational pull to your freeward float,

unable to lift skyward, like a spectre trapped in a room.

Disembodied but present, glimpsed in reaching shadow,

you were conjured at a remove, in those held breaths

between telephone calls, in the static throb and burn

between lost frequencies on endless drives to outskirts.

You were in the streets like electrical fire,

all negative space and a careful grave,

tended like a frozen pond or barren field,

a safe distance torn apart by blank forces.

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.