Department of Aerial Photography
"There can be no mistaking these things for the real. At best they are only tracings of where the real has been."
—Cormac McCarthy
"What motion is it that has established its collapse?"
—Angela Woodward
"I keep trying to feel who I was, but cannot."
—Jack Gilbert
1. Before death takes you, Hampstead, take back this: the tobacco field where I would mock death and recline in the dirt, ants mating in my hair, hoping that a vulture would mistake me for carrion. I believed the vulture’s wing would touch my face and cure me of this life, that its eyes would reveal the secret way to dying, never aware that we had invented each other.
⊙ The first memento mori was the land, clots of sea sewn from the horizon, the amoeba with a microscope and a shovel finding its way through the burned district. It’s enough of a reminder to see it from up here. In the fields there is the death clock shaped from sweet potato mounds and the face is looking not toward us, but inward, deep in the frost of 10,000 feet.
2. Here is where the childhood ghost returns, you’re thinking, nostalgia buried within, held to the shallows. There are no aerial photographs from 1979, when I moved to the woods with my mother and father. Rather, I’m afraid to find one. This is 1993 from 10,000 feet. The year my father died. There was more than just dying back then, though. Disease was a good enough excuse, but this wasn’t disease. We just didn’t know we were changing. Or what we were changing into.
⊙ If every photograph is a catastrophe that has already occurred, as Barthes says, and every camera is a clock for seeing, I measure my life through the intervals of landscape: what lasts, what still moves, disintegration loop of two foxes at dawn, always two foxes, always the oak, the government plane documents the land and through this we remain.
3. Here is where my father put down a salt lick at the edge of the woods, and deer gathered there, resigned, strange ocean at their feet, and took what they could. We stood at the window, eating potato chips, my sister a baby, her head soft and alive, tapping the crib wall. I was just a boy, and got the idea that the deer had ghosts looking out for them, ghosts of former deer. I would find their beds rounded among the long grasses, or in the needles of the pines, a pattern unlike any other grafted into the land.
⊙ Borges, say it louder this time: We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. Persimmons on the dirt road, fire ants expand and rise through the hurt they bring. Part of me disappeared in the blackberry. If I have a spirit, it will walk the vines, blood beads along its wrist.
4. Here is the summer of 1980. I walked into it alone, no ghost pulled me, no deer led me to the salt, light unborrowed deep in the briared loam, my tongue on loan from some other country, copperheads in the last sun, seed ticks under the nettles like moonlight.
⊙ To make a dead map mimic a living one, there must be some small mortality. Oblivion must be appeased. A boy choosing a field so the sky can see him. A sky choosing a boy so the field can sleep.
5. Here, down the field, over the marsh, the outboards chugged past the oyster beds, a night barge late through the morning scattered sparrows from the fish-house eaves.
⊙ The fish houses with their blue trucks and blue roofs and the fish-house boys filling the trucks with flounder and mackerel and stories of how they fuck this girl, how they fuck each other's mothers, how the wooden crates of iced shrimp get heavier and heavier like their salty heads hung on hooks of light.
6. Here is where the foxes rest, deep inside the arched rooms of their dens. Ann says, We will doubt every dense bone in the ground. We will not tire of this landscape. And I believe her.
⊙ Legend has it that Hampstead got its name from George Washington in the late 1780s. During one of Washington’s many trips along the King’s Highway he planned to spend the night in the area and feast on the abundant mullet caught in the Topsail sound. However, when he arrived, as luck would have it, the mullet were not running. Washington had to "feast" on ham instead and from that day on the area was known as "Hampstead", (pronounced: ham’stead). Rather than pork products, the historic London neighborhood of Hampstead was probably the namesake.
7. Here is where the old pine bound the wind, pale stubble-field gone to ash and cradle. It’s where Muffin the stray is buried. She came back to me, curled on the front porch, my father tried to bury her before I woke up, his shovel slow against the roots.
⊙ I write this as souvenir, bottling the landscape’s inability to reconcile, to endure our constant need to translate what is no longer. I am the witness in animal clothes, frustrated by the failure of the afterlife, grotesque at the tobacco field’s edge. There is no century to pull apart. The sweet-gum tree drops its little children into my father’s truck bed, giving up all allegiance to the coming frost.
8. Here is the ditch where dandelions cataract the day, deserted as stars, a star in each milky eye, a star like the hole you shoot through a pillowcase. There was a house here, abandoned in the ’40s, jars still on the pantry shelves marked with the year, pears from another hand, timeless with sun on their skin, pears turned poison in the last light of the century.
⊙ My ancestors, my dead men, my dead dog’s grave, I hear you through the radio static, the Christian station’s joyous AM lilt. Between the towers night wades the marshes, mortars the cattails, hammers into the red swell of sand.
9. The deer path where Molly the dog found a copperhead thick as ironwood, bad luck all over her paws. I could feel the foxes watching us from the underbrush with the feral indifference of gods.
⊙ This land is brutal in my memory; I do not forgive the velvet ants crackling my heels like radio dials. I do not forgive time’s disguise: roadkill of my youth on Sloop Point Road to which we have been condemned. I do not forgive the sour grass for taking my tongue, the yellow jackets against my ears with venom. I do not forgive the blister of years’ unlit rooms, Rudy Nixon drowning at 17, his mother on the floor of the church writhing toward his casket, and all the white kids terrified of their own muddled grief. Christopher Smart said For the method of curing an ague by terror is exaction. And I do not forgive him.
10. Here is the oak birthing a 50-year-old deer stand: rotless fruit. Carved into one of the boards, “8-point, 6-point, 3 fawns gone.” There is agreeable sound under the thistle the winds raise, a calm verse, deliberate, the bees building good honey, quail choosing seed. (My father carries a basket of pears under each arm. There is a wasp for each pear, and so on. This is the last time I will see him.)
⊙ A wreath of shotgun shells for the deer beds, not as warning but as forgiveness for their childhoods. It disappeared into history.
11. This far up, it’s hard to pick out the chinquapin oak. Look for the pale side above the wind. From the field it will look like snow returning. Walk toward the oak with gnats in your ears, with the rabbits startled from the corn. There will be movement in the low branches. Small wings and the marsh’s open mouth. The dirt rising in every bloom. The grouse-light of regret.
⊙ I feel that the photograph creates my body, then bears it away. It is no longer mine—the rooms where we slept and bled now contain other bodies that are not ours. This is how ruin begins.
12. Here is the osprey nest, carved from our youth. Dylan Thomas said, Who kills my history? The osprey nesting in the concrete tree, that’s who.
⊙ I pull from my mouth a clotted vine in the house that blood made. The trees are one tree and they make a human sound. On the radio, foxes broadcast lists of grievances too quickly for the translator: [very poor recording until sixteen seconds] ??? Mice. The ??? . ??? . ??? . ??? in the field. ??? in the right field. ??? . [We offer this ??? here (?)]. [??? rabbit not frog (?)]. We ??? . Algae tree ??? . We don't have to ??? they don—t bother us. We guess they didn't bother us. Tell us. What night ??? Our father ??? one portion of ??? . [they deliver a prayer].
13. Here is the firefly field where the bats lived that summer, grazing the night sky, pushing away the new season, an invisible song for no one.
⊙ Aurelius: Consider also what the vital spirit is: a current of air, not even continuously the same, but every hour being expelled and sucked in again.
14. Here is the winter of 1981, Gabe and I building a fire with stolen mail on the dirt floor of a tobacco barn. It is always late afternoon, the sun bearing up the wreck of the roof, smoke through the beams, even the dust abandoned, ditchwater clear as silt.
⊙ Faulkner, I do not know how to hold the dead. Are there ways? . . . I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire . . . I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.
15. Here’s Mr. Rivenbark’s pig field, the electric fence sparking the dew. One morning, there were three deer, two puppies and all the pigs, standing there looking at us. One morning all the pigs were gone.
⊙ A penny nail in a foot travels slow to the lung. Pray then for the toes that bless this glorious and noble dirt.
16. November ’82, Gabe and I strung a Conway Twitty cassette across the state road and waited for something to happen. Wind hummed the tape, two crows spotted us and fought over the sound. Hello Darlin’, nice to see you.
⊙ Foxtail and clover: we unspeak each other. Fog linens down the morning, indicates change, the almanac says, and maybe it’s right, negating the land and the air and the swamp fires in the north. Fog is obvious, palpable, there is a swelling, a murmur in the docks, and from the tree line it comes, a body on a cooling board pushed by a small hand of wind.
17. Here is the whip-poor-will through the low pines, signaling down the meadow and the years, a living radio mouthing news to the wind, quarried from the architecture of a child’s song in an old dead time, ghost of a ghost.
⊙ Once, the woods after twilight left us haloed in devout ruin.
18. Green pond, red pond, forest against the tides. Some other earth churned up these ashes. We know there cannot be a spindle of branches, fallen with light, yet there they are. I don’t mean to use “we” so lightly. No “we” is good enough for us.
⊙ There is something my mother told me. How the sea is simply light in an empty room and what came before the sea is a photograph of an open window in the room next to it, crease of sand, a lamp turned on. There is something Walter Benjamin told me. To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.” It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
19. It’s gone now, of course. There is no returning. Who will come to weep the grave of an alias? Three graves leech into the ground water. To drink a grave is to know the clock, the bassinet, to hold the gourd and never put it down.
⊙ I did not see God in the trees. What leaves there were pulled from the light a burdensome figure, Vaseline jar stored in the dead pine. A biscuit in each hand for the pigs flooding the field, all slop-mouthed and breeching.
20. Look, there I am, a boy in 1979 holding a copperhead skin to the light. 1981, my hands smelling of moss. ’83, lost in the marsh; ’86, the meadow as paper tacked to the charcoal morning. A man in 1993 bent at fixing himself somewhere, in the space between our being and the earth that is. Watching the woods as if it was somehow accountable.
⊙ The work of memory collapses time, Benjamin says. But this isn’t time I’m talking about. It’s translating water, the little fish I called aspirin-eye, silver and white and alive in the creek. Landscape was nothing more than a burden, a poor name for the earth that was already mine. Water remained water, as it should, the brailed tips of the waves, the immutable fact that drowning is an honor here, always giving the horizon, which is not light and dark but a place beyond: hieroglyphs of otter and ghost crab, hurricane lanterns strung in the crepe myrtle. To be here is to know the end of things, and here I am, years gone, bathed in the same twilight that I owned without knowing it, the sound of boats tolling against docks, of metal falling to water, and the houses across the marsh warming the coming night with the little bit of hope a few bulbs can throw onto the world.
Contributor’s notes
Introduction
Department of Aerial Photography
Acknowledgments