12/31/11

Edenton

Every time I visit my father's mother in Edenton, North Carolina I come back filled with stories, names, dates and images that are too much for my brain to keep inside, let alone compartmentalize and store. I could make this entire blog about Edenton and the rich layers of history that have been laid down there, and how the Capehart family has worked their own deposits into the soil of eastern North Carolina.

But I won't, because I can't do it justice. I keep wishing there was time to sit down and interview my grandmother, who at 94, is a goldmine of information about eastern North Carolina and its residents for the past 200 years or so. But my grandmother, with four children (and their spouses), ten grandchildren (and four spouses), six great-grandchildren, dozens of nieces and nephews, hundreds of friends and innumerable "adopted" family, flits as fast as she can flit between this person and this person, talking all the while. But I can't keep up. Neither with her flitting or her talking. At 94, my grandmother outpaces me.

Now that I am home, I plan to spend more time with her and possibly get those interviews I've been wanting. Because they will make a fantastic book.

For now, you get some photos of the scenery. What else do take pictures of? (Click to embiggen)

Edenton sits on Albemarle sound. Thus, there is swamp. A lot of swamp.

Hearing my grandmother say the word "swamp" in her accent sends me into fits every time. "Swaump!"

The water was the color of iodine and only inches deep.
Cypress trees. Yes this is upside-down. No I did not flip it post-production.

Swamp. And cypress nubs.

What the photos unfortunately do not give you is the smell of the swamp. Which is far more fragrant than what you'd expect. I can't describe it to you other than to say it's halfway between the smell of a forest and the smell of a lake. Makes sense, doesn't it, when pretty much that's what a swamp is.

I didn't just hang out in a swamp all day, despite what the photos tell you. I swear.

12/28/11

The truth

At night all my doubts and worries creep from the shadows and the shadows give them life. They whisper my fear back at me and since there is no such thing as a voice without a body, I glance fearfully over my shoulder, even though my back is to the wall, for the dark bodies with claws.
            Did I do the right thing? Did I make the right choice?
            I still wonder. I may never stop wondering that.
            And that is another set of claws, attached to long, many-jointed hairy arms, attached to a shadowy body, home to a mind that’s nothing but the worst of my own.
            One set of claws says that I did this to myself. People say “It’s not your fault”. No, it’s not wholly my fault, but nothing in this world is wholly anything. I made some decisions and brought the consequences down on myself. I know I’m going to have to pay my due. And I’m paying it.
            And I’m learning lessons.
            This is what I think about during the day, when the shadows slink and melt and the claws crumble like ashes.
            I’m learning lessons that I should have learned much sooner, that many people learn much later and even more never learn at all.
            Part of doing right by to someone else is doing right by yourself first. First.
            Other people never ever ever fit in the holes in your soul. Trying to make them fit is an injustice to both of you.
            Where you invest your love is where you invest your life. Invest wisely.
            These things, and thousands of other little lessons like dandelions fill a field I like to visit when I’m feeling bad. Their sheer yellowness is overpowering and blasts every fold of my brain clear of shadows.  Each time I leave the field I bring a little bit more of its light back with me so that the good mood lasts a little longer.
            It’s like a battery, this yellowness, but it never lasts long enough to get me through the thick, creeping night.
            Not yet.
            I know there’s something else I’m supposed to be learning, supposed to be doing, but I still don’t know what that is yet. That’s why the yellow battery runs out so quickly.
            I’m back to square one, the skittering claws and snapping jaws say. Before, at least, I had love. I had a badly-fitting but well-sewn patch for my threadbare soul. Now the patch has been ripped away and the tight stitches have taken that piece of my soul with it. Now there’s nothing to keep the shadows and their poison out.
Good thing I’m used to this.
It’s been easier this time to fight the corrupting influence of them, ironically because the love I had gave me strength and gave substance to my soul. It heals just like the body does, by bleeding, by pain, by sewing up the fabric with its own substance. But it heals much more slowly.
And the infections are a problem.
            All the while I gather the shreds of myself up and try to fit them back to where they once were. Oh but the pieces are so tiny. I’ve always been bad at jigsaw puzzles. Not bad at them, but just not patient enough.
            But I can’t afford not to be patient, or I’ll never finish and I’ll never get my whole self back.
            If only I had some other enemy than my apathy or impatience or insecurity.
            People say, “Nobody’s perfect.” People say, “Nothing’s impossible.” People say,“You tried your best and that’s all anybody can ask.” People say, “Do or do not. There is no try.”
            Which is it?
            People say, “Your decisions make you who you are.”
            I say, “Everything is relative.”
            So where does that leave us?
            A lesson I keep learning and I will never stop learning and it will never stop hurting is this:
            There are no absolutes. There are no forsures. There are no guarantees.
            That is the single most comforting and the single most terrifying truth I have ever encountered.
            And it seems to run the universe.

12/10/11

Hey I'm back with a poem

This is my first post here in almost a year! Also this is my first poem in almost that long.

I suck at titles.

"Sigh-n Wave"


Me minus you is
A simple equation with no simple answer.
Us minus each other is
Nothing but silence across the covers.
Two asunder is no longer one and one
But one asunder
And one asunder.

I’m so tired of these mechanical anti semantic
Idiot numbers, one, two, thirteen.
Idiot one.
Give me words over numbers, please
Oh won’t you say something
To divide this silence, to
Subtract the longing, to
Derive some sort of meaning from this negation of years?

Years minus us is time torn from memory.
Unanchored, we float in our memories of each other. Moorless,
Our numbers a poor substitute for the muscle memory of holding each other.

Time plus time will be multiplied into healing and motion but
Sorrow graphed in lines and waves upon our faces, our hearts is
A repeating decimal,
Forever reminding us of our idiot ones, our broken twos and how we
Add the idiot numbers up to make something
Not so idiot.

(C)Kate Capehart 2011

2/24/11

Ponies and Soldiers

I posted this dream first over on "and then i couldn't breathe" (andthenicouldntbreathe.blogspot.com). The contributors to that blog all write down and categorize their dreams. It's a really neat read-- some bizarre and crazy dreams over there! Go check it out.

The dream began in the midst of a gunfight between two small groups of soldiers. It got a little odd when I realized the enemy had decided to occupy and fortify my childhood home in the middle of the North Carolina suburbs. Instead of the slightly rusted chain link fence that surrounded the back yard, I and my company of four were balked by a new glittering razorwire fence around the whole property. The front of my mind was occupied by the plan we’d come up with for infiltrating the “compound”, but a tiny mouse-voice in the back of my mind glanced around, tapped ceaselessly for attention and peeped “Hey, um. This shouldn’t be happening. Not in broad springtime daylight. Not in this neighborhood. Where are the neighbors?”

 “They’re all dead, of course. These bastards killed them all,” my “rational sense” replied. “Which is why we have to get in there and neutralize them.”

My team and I approached my house from the west; from behind the nine-foot-tall screen of magnolia bushes my elderly neighbors had planted to protect themselves from our two loud, overzealous dogs.

The razorwire fence stood just on the other side of the bushes. We crept close to the heavily-guarded gate, our M-16s at the ready. There was no door, only a gap like a missing tooth in the run of the fence. One of my fellows poked his rifle through the bushes and shot blindly; he took out two of the guards. The remaining two watched their comrades flop to the ground like dead fish, then opened fire on the bushes. I broke cover and ran at the two guards. I pointed my M-16 and shot one guard in the chest at point-blank range. He flew back in a spray of blood. The last remaining guard turned his M-9 (handgun) on me and we stared down each others’ barrels for a minute or so until I shot him high in the belly. He made a whiny sound like he’d just been interrupted and did not appreciate it. I could feel my fellows getting antsy behind me; I told them to go take the house. They burst out from the bushes and ran screaming at the house. They were instantly mown down by several M-240 machine guns. The sound was earsplitting, like steel popcorn in a tin bucket.

The wounded guard staggered, moaning, and I realized that I had shot him in the worst possible place besides maybe the groin. With a preternaturally accurate sense of geometry (and anatomy) I only possess in dreams, I calculated that my bullet had hit his stomach, large intestine, and lodged in his left kidney. No major blood vessels were damaged, so he would not bleed out quickly.

So I dropped my M-16 and approached the soldier with my hands up in an indication of harmlessness. He, wild-eyed like a trapped fox, tried to point his M-9 at me but his hand was shaking violently. I gently took the handgun and shushed him like a mother. He quieted, let out a huge, relieved sigh and said, “My name is Geoff. I’m going to die soon.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I began leading him around the interior perimeter of the fence, (somehow) out of range of the M-240s at the house, toward the driveway, which leads to the backyard. He stopped directly in front of the house. “Hang on,” he panted bashfully, painfully. “I gotta pee.”

Does it have to be now? I thought, eyeing the multiple gun barrels peeking out of the boarded house windows like the black malevolent eyes of night animals. But I didn’t verbally protest, knowing this is probably one of the last acts this dying man would undertake. Nobody should die with a full bladder.

So I disentangled myself from him and held him steady as he unbuckled his ammo belt and unbuttoned his fly. After I asked him if he’s okay to stand on his own, I politely turned away and let him do his business.

Geoff whimpered and grunted like a baby animal behind me and I felt a pang of sympathy so profound I nearly pulled his M-9 from my belt to end his misery. But my sympathy was riven in half by a shriek so otherworldly I almost realized I was dreaming. I turned to see Geoff’s face contorted with horror and pain. His urine stream was a watery red, laced with ribbons of near-black. It wasn’t trickling out steadily like urine does; it was spraying out like water from a showerhead, so forcefully that a cloud of fine spray appeared around the head of Geoff’s penis.

As if to add flavor to my growing alarm, a wind sprang up and blew the blood-laced urine onto me. I was showered with it, soaked with it, drenched with it. I let out a screech of my own and immediately regretted opening my mouth.

I suddenly bolted up the driveway toward the house, still bristling with guns, prepared in the back of my mind to be blown away, and not entirely satisfied by dying covered in a dying man’s bodily fluids.

I burst through the gate separating the back from the front lawn and ran to the hose curled up there by the back door.

My mind at this point underwent a curious halving. One half, temporarily taking control of my body, was obsessed only with getting Geoff’s blood/urine off me. The other half, waiting patiently and quietly in the back, wondered why I wasn’t being shot at and planned how to get in and retake the house in my parents’ name. After all, it was their goddamn house.

I shed my helmet, ammo belt, pack, boots, socks, and tore off my fatigues until I was completely naked. I pointed the hose at my face, had a curious double image of a gun barrel and Geoff’s penis, then the painfully cold water hit me.  I scrubbed madly at my face, my neck, arms, hair, hands, body. The water smelled sweet and earthy and I attempted to inhale it to get the acid tang of blood and urine out of my nose. This of course resulted in a racking spasm of coughs as I realized rather quickly that my lungs would not accept water as a usable source of oxygen. This broke me out of the panic-circle, and I turned off the water. Shivering, panting, sodden and naked (but clean), I stood there and let the halves of my mind swap places. Where were the soldiers? Why hadn’t they shot at me? The back door wasn’t barred. Could I get in?

I began to poke around the back of the house and found a small, newly overturned mound of earth beside the air conditioning unit. I dug like a dog and unearthed a gallon-size Ziploc bag full of magazines. Svelte women in various degrees of undress graced every single cover. I chuckled to myself. “Looks like I found my enemy’s porn stash.”

Suddenly I remembered Geoff. I had left him out in the middle of the front yard, pissing blood and screaming like a nine year old girl! I stood up and, with no regard for the soldiers and guns in the house, scurried out of the back yard and back down the driveway.

Poor Geoff was right where I’d left him, still holding his penis, which by now was just dribbling thick dark blood. He was barely upright; his shoulders and head sagged deeply. I approached him gingerly, eyeing his penis, ready to bolt if it were to start spraying again.

“I’m sorry I ran away,” I said softly, again at a loss for words. I was no good at dealing with dying people.

“’S okay,” he slurred and struggled to lift his head.

I stood there clueless for a moment, then remembered the stack of magazines in my hands.  “Hey, look,” I said to Geoff cheerily, holding out a copy of Playboy. “Titties.”

He managed a small half-smile, his eyes resting on something that was not the magazine. “Yes ma’am.”
            I struggled to follow his gaze, then realized why. He’d been looking at me. I had not reclothed myself after my hose-bath. Mortified and mortified that I’d been mortified by a dying man, I clapped the stack of magazines over my naked breast.

“Uh, I’m… I’m gonna go back up to the house to find clothes… and you some water.”

Without waiting for a reply from Geoff, I skittered back up the driveway.

At this point the dream shifted to a nighttime newly fallen. I remained in my driveway, but the house had reverted to its proper place as my parents’ house and childhood home. The chain link fence separating the front from the back yard was still intact, so I lifted the catch and opened the gate. At its familiar clink-chuk sound, my little sister turned. I smiled and waved; she waved back from her place sitting on the grass just beyond the driveway. I sat down beside her (fully clothed) and followed her eyes to a place cradled in darkness on the far side of our neighbors’ yard.

In waking reality, our neighbors to the left had planted the magnolias; our neighbors to the right had just used the portion of our fence that bordered their yard to start a fence of their own.  In dream reality, the partition between yards was no longer there. Neither was the fence between our neighbors’ and their neighbors’ yards. Ours was the end of a five-house-long strip of fenced backyard.

As I realized what stood in that pocket of darkness, the purpose of this backyard strip became clear. It was a makeshift paddock to contain two horses.

My sister and I watched them move and graze. The adrenaline-soaked anxiety that had laced the first part of my dream (a very distant memory now, like I’d dreamed it and was now awake) was eased by the presence of family and animals, but not entirely abolished. What was left was a diluted sense of unease which is, if you’ve read accounts of my other dreams, the default setting in which I operate.

“It’s so cruel to keep them here like this,” my sister said and sighed.

I agreed.  I wasn’t entirely sure which of our neighbors owned these animals, but nobody ought to be keeping two large beasts of burden in a tiny suburban neighborhood.

“Let’s get them outta here,” my sister said, the weight of conviction in her voice. We stood and gently approached the horses. They were both bay. One was far larger than the other. The larger one had traces of Shire in its conformation (body shape). The smaller one, with feathered feet like its companion, was cutely ponyish, but not too small to ride. My sister ran her hands over the Shire’s glossy coat and cooed to it with something like reverence. It stood sedately, letting itself be talked to and caressed. The ponyish bay seemed to size me up and deem me worthy. Of what I wasn’t sure, but it allowed me to climb on its back once I’d helped my sister clamber onto the Shire. I leaned over and unlatched the gate and we rode the horses west down our street, away from the main part of town.

I noticed a tiny constant clicking slightly below the clip clop of hoofbeats on asphalt. I turned and saw three mongrel dogs, all the same shade of mutt-brown, all low, quiet and frightened. The clicking was the sound of their claws as they trotted. I smiled warmly down at them, mentally inviting them to stay; we’d find food for them soon.

My sister yelped.

“What?!”

She pointed; I looked. Several men were running toward us, guns leveled.

“Run!” I called to my sister and wheeled my pony around, but my sister had trouble turning the Shire without a bridle, since she was smaller than me and it was bigger than my pony.

A single roaring shot ripped the night-quiet apart. The Shire shied, stepped back, wavered, snorted, and fell. Like a stone monument. Agonizingly slowly. I prayed that since my sister had no stirrups to tangle her feet, she could jump clear of the falling ton-and-a-quarter of horse without being crushed, but instead of jumping, she froze with fear and watched herself fall with her horse.

I vaulted off my pony and began to yell for my sister. I reached the part of her that wasn’t trapped beneath the massive horse just as my wake-up alarm began to chime. Her eyes were closed and a pool of blood began to seep out from behind her head. Then I woke up.

2/3/11

Heaven's experience

I had a dream in which I was acting out the events of a story my waking self read, but the story was a dream and I woke up still dreaming. This is the story as I remember it.


Edit: the "he" in the story is a nameless, faceless male presence. My mind did not specify.


One evening while we painted stars on our ceiling with flecks of broken glass, he asked me to a masquerade ball. His face was pale, and I asked him if he was all right. He said yes; I said yes.

For me we picked out a black and red tuxedo cut for a woman. It fit me well. I preened uncharacteristically in the mirror for a while until he chuckled, having dressed in his own costume, and pulled me gently out the door.

The neighborhood was dark and as we walked I had trouble seeing him. I knew he’d dressed as a vampire, but the fitful orange light of the streetlamps played changeling with his face and once he was pensive; once his face was lined with animal rage. I felt the press of unease on my mind like a crowded train station. But I kept to myself.

I could hear the sounds of the masquerade, hosted by a friend of his who collected old houses like stray dogs but never found the time to wash or fix them, from down the street. I deliberately slowed my pace, needing to prepare myself for the wild forest of sound, heat, bodies, movement, sensation inside the house. I told him to go in without me; I’d be there soon. He nodded, smiled (and it was broken on his face), and went in. I continued down the street.

A yellow-orange blink of light on the ground grabbed my eyes. It was a large coin, almost the size of my fist. To hold it in one hand I had to keep all the fingers splayed wide.  I liked it. The faces were primitive, Slavic. I tucked it into the waistband of my pants and covered it with the cummerbund. Its comforting weight immediately brought me peace. I turned around and walked back to the pulsing house, ready to face the riot.

But he and two friends came out and met me on the stoop. I smiled, but only he returned it. It took him a few tries, as if the act of smiling caused him pain. So far he’d kept his mask perched on top of his head, and I secretly begged him not to cover his face with it. Broken smiles were better than hidden ones.

He invited me to walk down the street from the way I’d come. He took my arm and led me chivalrously. We passed the place where I’d found the coin and I felt a jab of territorial, frantic jealousy for the coin. Nobody must have it. I pressed my arm against my belly and was again comforted by the coin’s steady weight and shape.

We walked, and my body began to twist in its deep places as it does when I sense wrongness like a wolf waiting just outside the ring of light made by a camper’s fire. I didn’t let the uncomfort get as far as my face. I asked him where we were going. He said “To get you a new mask. It’s a masquerade after all, and you have to have a mask.”

I’d completely forgotten about a mask. His, still cocked back on top of his head, was nothing but two black gapes for eyes and a wavering, fanged maw of a mouth. He’d done well on his vampire costume, well except for the face. I glanced behind me; his two friends walked quietly, their bodies empty of expression or attitude.

The street became pocked and turtlebacked; the houses grew shabby and sad. We walked through this blasted neighborhood and the dark began to collect in pockets and send out vines. Soon we were overrun by rank growth of darkness, and I kept my hand on the coin. It was warm, having collected heat from my body.

We rounded a corner, and light limned the edges of things. It was not moonlight or street-light, and it was still four hours too early for the sun. It was only what it was not; a sourceless sickly yellow light that threw me into doubt, doubt for myself, doubt of him, his friends, the party, the coin. Oh, the coin.

I gazed at him, pleading with my eyes, and he slid the mask down over his face. Under it, though, I saw a small, genuine, apologetic smile, lined by pointed teeth. He said, “Come on. There’s a party store at the end of this block. We can find you a mask there.”

I didn’t resist when he and his friend each took my arm. I sensed that I could have. There was nothing acting on me to slow me, stupefy me, confuse me or disable me. Only a grossly inflated curiosity, swelling my skull with hot air. I felt lightheaded and giddy and would have settled a hand on top of my head to keep it from floating away but one hand needed to stay pressed against the coin and the other needed to stay linked to his.

The end of the block was a dead end. A brick wall with a razorwire fence on top. The ugly yellow light dripped off the wire like pus.

“I guess the party store was down the next block,” he said, but did not turn. His friends, one on my other arm and one drawn up beside him, stared straight ahead like tin soldiers. He took my shoulders gently and turned me around to face the entrance to the dead end alley. We all turned. It was as if the alley had been cleared deliberately, as if the buildings had consciousness enough to part for us. Because as we stood with our backs to that wall, the street stretched out in front of us, straight and flat as the desert, arrowing to a point so small it was unseeable.

How many angels can dance at the end of a road? I thought madly, and felt my mind break from its moorings.

He stepped close to me and tenderly, gingerly untied the scarlet bowtie at my neck. His nose almost touched the line of my jaw. His thick cologne bit my nose and the sound of his labored breath rasped my ears.  His friends unbuttoned my topcoat with civility but no care. They pulled it off, sleeve by sleeve, then he untucked my shirt and began to unbutton it. His friends untied the cummerbund at my back and I reflexively clasped the coin to my belly to keep it from falling. I held it there, fearing more for its safety than my own as he removed my bra. The diseased yellow light wanted nothing to do with their faces, instead slathering itself over my bared skin. The light lay on me like a sick and sleeping cat, hot and heavy and itching.        

They stepped back, his friends, against the wall and into the thick shadow that suddenly grew there. Something drew my eyes to the point of road hundreds of miles in front of me, and again one of the ropes that anchored my mind snapped. There, crouched just below the horizon like the big brother of the light-cat asleep on my bare chest, was the source of the light. I knew in a moment it would rise like a bastard usurper son.

Suddenly I felt a bright flare of pain high on my side, near my right breast. He had slid a wicked-looking knife between my ribs. It slid in easily at first, dizzyingly easily, then hit resistance. He stopped, balked by my body, hesitant to continue. I thought, “Hurry up; it hurts. Put your back into it.” Then the not-sun’s yellow-grey light pierced the horizon and raced toward me faster than I could see. I stood with my naked top half, my breasts bare to the light but still I felt the knife go no deeper. I looked over at him. His eyes were closed.

Now I knew why he seemed too small… because he was lying down, asleep. Now I knew why nobody felt real; because nobody else was really there. It was only him and me in our bedroom. I lay in bed with a knife between my ribs, and I knew I had done it. The small sounds and squirms of my death may have reached him lying next to me, but he only stirred and moaned lightly. The pain of my body shutting down, little by little, was exquisite.

But then there was more than the pain. My body ceased shutting down (the knife fell from my side and clanged on the floor) and began to change. This was painful too, but painful as growing is. Itchy. Achy.

The pain abandoned me completely, and I felt new. I was aware that I had arms, legs, a body. Time. A mind. Strength. Teeth.

I took a breath. I was aware of heaven’s drawn-in experience like a brush of fine sand across my cheek.