country dark

For the past two days I have been looking at a book of Charles Burchfield paintings. I am looking at these paintings (as I did at their Guggenheim show last year) as something known, something recognized, not brand new to me. They are forest magic, they are sun through trees, they are the painter sitting quietly in the woods and watching everything that happens, filtered through his own lens, through the experience of his emotions and new lexicon of his senses.

I am seeing these paintings in the same way that I think about landscapes I have never seen, but know, landscapes of red dirt, James Baldwin landscapes, blood-soaked landscapes, haunted coasts, landscapes of the South. I remember the physical shock and tangle of reading books like 'Sula' by Toni Morrison, 'Beloved', anything by James Baldwin, stories stories REAL stories.

I was just watching a 'documentary' about a family in the South that was haunted by spirits, their house was inhabited by older spirits, older dead. The daughters were haunted, the houses were dark with it, benign and lurking dark spirits. I didn't catch the beginning and am not sure exactly where this took place but they revealed that the mother had grown up in a place called 'Haunted Holler'! Even through the screen I could sense a thickness of the sir, like fog or pea soup, a field of something collected, stronger particles that had grown. When they showed footage of the house I wondered, is this 'haunting' or is this the very similar experience of living next to a forest, in a single lit bejeweled tiny house, next to looming dark, black night that falls without any reflection from cities or street lights, living in true country dark?

(In Marfa) when we heard owls hunting over our heads at night, when we were separated from the wildness outside by a thin screen, when we lived exactly one and a half blocks from the drop-off edge of town, with skunks, and trains, and husked quietness, other cries? How different did this feel? It took me at least two months to get New York city out of my system. I was shaky and thin there, translucent for a good cold month of March and then into April. I took walks at sunset, I collected rocks, I tried to write, I planted seeds in the strange white ceramic planter in our backyard with a stone rabbit on top. I took pictures of storms that rolled in off of the high plains of Colorado-- flat and roiling, flat desert edge to black clouds, backdrop to clouds that felt wet and were driven by static.

It is raining in Brooklyn today, and I am at home. I am surrounded by lamplight. I
am remembering the high desert at night, missing earth, land, soil, roughness, living on top of a place that felt like something. I am remembering these things, but have a feeling that I am also trying not to remember them. The edges of my memories creep in, and I try my best to separate them into shades of light, fragments, stones strung, words.