graham irvin

Croatan Haibun

When Kaitlin and I still lived in Wilmington we made plans to go to the Croatan National Forest. I put the words “Croatan National Forest” into the Google Maps app on my phone and we drove toward the dot. It took four hours to get to the place in the world represented by the dot. There was no entrance to the forest. I assumed the dot would represent a place in the world that welcomed us. A visitor center. A park with trails. An archway between the trees. There was a sign in front of a dense section of woods that said, “Welcome to the Croatan National Forest,” but there was no way for us to get inside the forest. There were narrow dirt roads with chains across them. There were lone generators imprisoned in chain link fences. We drove until we found a gas station. We asked for directions. The person behind the counter didn’t know what the Croatan National Forest was. We drove to a different gas station. That person didn’t know either. No one had even heard of the Croatan National Forest. “You’re in it,” I said. “Oh, well.” So, instead we found a nearby lake on the Google Maps app and parked on a dirt road and walked for thirty minutes to the flat lake in the middle of what was part desert and part parking lot. It was a failure of a trip. Kaitlin didn’t seem mad. She never got mad, but I was sure this was proof of my incompetence. I waited for her to express, sometime later, that yes, it was a wasted day, yes, it was too long of a drive to end at a gravel tundra two hundred miles away from anywhere we knew. But that never came. 

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On the way back we drove through a town that was all farm and green spread out in every direction. There were new crops on both sides of the highway, soybean or peanut. I looked out at them, still kicking myself about the failure of the trip, comparing that peaceful landscape to the nothing we found, and got a big idea. It was the perfect land for dying. Or maybe it wasn’t about dying out there it was just about death. It was a place perfect for finding a body. Out in the middle of a new crop, a symbol of income, steady wealth, a symbol of sustained community, a body could be found, and I became obsessed with that imagined event. I wanted to be the town and the field and the body. And I knew the body was wrapped in a black plastic trash bag, and from afar the body was not yet a body, only a black bag. And I knew someone had to find it for it to transform back into a body. I wanted to be the person who found the bag, who approached the bag, who opened the bag. I wanted to be the metamorphosis of bag to body. And I knew it was not just a body but a torso. Headless and limbless. A body without human identity. I wanted to be witness and witnessed. Headless and plastic and a budding blossom of capital fruit. I wanted to be god looking down on it all, creating me in every atom of that moment. When we got back to Wilmington, I told our friend Eli about the big idea. About wanting to be the body and the bag and everything else. I talked about it so much and for so long. Until four in the morning. Until the neighbors shouted from their windows. I talked about it, explained it, doubled down on it. Then, Eli wrote a poem about the beauty of my big idea. About my telling of the big idea. I didn’t know how to write the big idea myself. I was glad it existed in the form of Eli’s poem, but I still needed to get it off my chest. 

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Another friend, Dan, released an album on Bandcamp called Same Fucking Green World. One of the songs, “(It Would Be a Shame To) Hate the Book,” had a line that went, “Don’t read anymore, just spit in the field.” It brought me back to that trip. I hadn’t thought much of it that year. His song reminded me of everything. My field. My body. My bag. My witness. My god. I felt determined to write about the field for real. To get out my ideas. I had all the time in the world. I had been experimenting with writing while intoxicated. It felt novel and fun. I drank from 5pm to 9pm, then ate half a gummy edible, then drank until midnight, then ate the other half of the edible, then wrote and drank tea until sunrise. I wanted to focus all of those experimental hours on the big idea that never went anywhere. So, I did. I drank and ate an edible and drank more and ate more edibles and drank tea. I labored over the words and the images they could conjure and the way the lines broke the sentences. I stared at the screen and typed then erased and typed again. Hours to get out everything that needed to be said about the field and my confusion and my desire to die and live infinitely there. And after all of that, here’s what I got:

part of north carolina that felt like coming home 

somewhere past cape carteret or bogue
or just past that a field in late fall
empty sallow highway 24 dirt stained 
reflective vest wet with dew and sweat 
at 5:17 no sun no roosters
a torso wrapped in black plastic