Place 12: Dusk

Saturday November 28, 2009 4:43 pm

The first two things I notice when I come into the cemetery: the color of the light reflecting off bare tree branches, a glassy amber; and crows, there must be hundreds of them. As I start out on the road to the clearing, I see crows everywhere I look. Some perch atop tree limbs at the crowns of bare trees; silhouetted in the falling light they looked like large, fickle leaves. Others pose in the grass and among the tombstones and a few brazen souls sit right in the middle of the road. My eyes follow their black bodies from one to the next, as if trying to connect the dots or resolve their scattered forms into some larger, coherent shape: through the grass, across the road, up the hillside, into the trees, and as I approach they break ranks and rise into the sky. The air fills with caws and the beating of their black wings.

As I continue down the road, I pass two turkeys and numerous deer. The colors are so delicate at this time of day, right before dusk. Everything is cast in shades of rose and pale blue and gray. The sunlight catches the trees and illuminates them in its pink-orange glow.

The clearing looks so soft and gentle in this light. Crows are perched in the tops of all the trees, even the dead tree I've come to love so much. I notice that my dead tree is starting to look almost like the other trees, now that they've all lost their leaves. One difference is that the dead tree has only its thick, main limbs; it lacks the smaller capillary branches that the other trees have. And it’s a slightly different color, whitish-gray, while the other trees tend more towards brown. Despite these differences, it’s starting to blend in with the trees around it. Many more leaves have fallen since the last time I was here; almost every leaf is gone from the trees now. I was starting to doubt my memories of winter landscapes filled with nothing but barren gray branches. I try to enter the clearing slowly and quietly so the crows won't fly away, but I fail.

The floor of the clearing appears to have been torn up again. Maybe construction equipment has pushed the mounds of dirt back towards the side of the ravine. I'm not sure how it happened or why, but the puddles in front of the dirt piles are wider and deeper than I've ever seen them before. From a certain perspective, the sense of scale is lost and the mound of dirt in back of the puddle rises like a mountain beside a lake.

The muddy ground keeps a record of other creatures that have visited the clearing recently. I think these are deer tracks - this is something I hope to investigate more in the future.

I turn to face the other side of the clearing, to the elm tree and the piles of marble slabs, and to my surprise I see the moon glowing clear and soft in the blue sky behind a thicket of bare branches.

In each direction I look, the light and sky are so different. At the back of the clearing the moon shines in light blue twilight; out past the ravine, the pink dusk settles over hills and houses; and when I turn towards the gate to the clearing, I see that the sky is a gradient of blue to white to yellow to orange, like the reverse of a flame.

It's cold today. I'm bundled in coat and scarf and hat and gloves. It's muddy too, and my feet slip and sink into ground as I walk. But I have a hard time leaving. This is such a special moment, caught between night and day. As I walk outside of the clearing, I turn and look back. I will continue to come here and keep this blog after the class ends. I feel like I have only begun to know this place.