They filmed Blue Velvet
In an apartment building
In Wilmington North Carolina
Called “The Carolinas”
I know because I lived in the complex
Just across the street
Was an old southern style church
White and tall
Its steeple reaching into the heavens
With a clever little cross
Just on top
On Sunday morning you could hear
The singing
From our apartment building
And after the ceremony
I would watch from the window
As the people poured out into the street
And onto the sidewalk
Where they would congregate
Traditional black and white Sunday dress
And there
Just across the street
Beside the church
On its very lawn
Grew the most incredible Oak tree
I have ever seen
Its trunk was full and wide
And its limbs reached high into the sky
Throwing shadow over steeple in the evening sun
Which fell over the Earth at the mouth
Of the mighty Cape fear...
I imagine that the roots of this great tree
Probably reached to the sea
Deep in the soil and down to the rivers bed
Its roots ran through the town
Under every house and home
It had been there as long as any one in the town
And certainly longer than the church
It was the center of our small city
Which had sprung up around it
Much as towns were built in the south
But
One year there was a great storm
A hurricane that crushed the eastern coast
Between the Cape Fear and the Atlantic
The town was forced to evacuate
But some stayed to gamble with the hurricane
I was young and dumb
And full of blood
And watched from the window
As God brought the flood
The river came right up into the street
Just under our second story window
By about two feet
The lightning swallowed the night
Turning itself into sun for only seconds
As the thunder shook the window sills
In a rattle of bones
And in thin moments of silence
I could hear the radiators hiss in the apartment
Like a snake wrapping itself around the arm of Eve
As she sank her teeth into his offering
The church looked eerie half under water
Quite biblical
A great white whale splashing around in a Melville tale
Wind and rain breaking on its skin
As the shadows from the tree gave the illusion
That the church was movin
Its tail had broken the surface
Of the stormy Ocean Earth
And then came splashing down again
Creating a giant wave
Which broke against our apartment building
And just like that
The whale was gone...vanished

The morning after the storm
I awoke and went directly to the window
The water had run back into the river
And there...just across the street
I saw the tree
And just below its trunk
Sat a church stump
And across the lawn
The carcass of its cross
Evidently lightning had struck the steeple
And brought it back to the Earth
This particular event
Sat heavy in me
For I was ALWAYS told that the Church
Was gods home
A safe place to be near the Lord
But the thing that affected me more
Was the tree
For I was ALWAYS told that lightning
ALWAYS struck
The tallest object
And the tree was certainly taller
This great event made me see the town
Quite different
I began to wonder
What the tree
Had really seen in its long history
And
In the months that followed
The most unforeseeable event took place
On the lawn by the church
Lumberjacks came in
And like the plague they scaled the tree
Taking it to the ground like leprosy
Its mighty flesh falling from its trunk
Piece by piece
Back to the Earth
That had given birth to the tree
And its entire city
The windows of The Carolinas shook once more
Like they had in the storm
As its meat hit the earth and made it move
It took weeks to bring the tree to the street
Where it met with truck
And they hauled it off
And as I watched with a strange sadness
It seemed that no one else
Saw the madness
And just when it was as insane as it could possible get
It got more outlandish

There...on the church lawn
Where the tree had survived the storm
They began reconstruction
On the church steeple
And much faster than it took the tree to grow
I watched the steeple rise into the sky
Like a big DUNCE HAT or KLAN HOOD
And there it stood

On the stump of the tree
Which had survived storms for centuries

Then
One sunny morning
A crane came down our street
And stopped
Just between The Carolinas
And the cross
And as they lifted it from the lawn
To put the steeple back on
I saw the scar where the tree
Had once been
And the madness of men

In the film
I believed the building we lived in was called
“The Riverside Apartments”
And they left out the part about
The tree
And the church
But they certainly captured the spirit
Of that small town
FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES