Dear Kurl,
Good old Walt. He was writing about sex all along, wasn’t he? You’re absolutely right that you have to understand his poetry with your body, not your mind. I can’t wait to reread “Song of Myself,” after tonight.
I couldn’t believe it when I read the lines from Walt in your letter just now. When we finally made it up the stairs and into my tent, the one clear thought I managed to form was Walt’s line,
Urge and urge and urge. Always the procreant urge of the earth.
The word procreant doesn’t make perfect sense here, I realize. Yet I did have the feeling tonight that we were creating something together, something frightening and precious and new. Maybe co-creant is a better word for it? The co-creant urge of the earth?
Anyhow. This happens to be the line that comes directly after the lines you said you were remembering. It’s almost as though Walt was cheering us along from the sidelines, the voyeuristic old bugger.
I sat down to write this letter as an apology for not lingering longer when you crawled back into my tent and woke me up, for hurrying you out the door at one in the morning instead of asking you to stay. I was imagining my family arriving home any minute, and Lyle coming in to check on me (not that he’d ever do more than call hello and good night from the doorway), and then breakfast in the morning (not that either Lyle or Shayna eat breakfast), and me suddenly being faced with trying to introduce you to them in this new context (not that we’ve decided there is a new context; despite your avowal that what happened between us was important, I’m not assuming there needs to be a new context of any kind, Kurl; we can talk about context later, or even not talk about it at all; the last thing I want to do is overanalyze this and start badgering you with demands to talk about it like before!).
As it turns out, it’s now 2 a.m. and Shayna only just got home. I can hear from the way she is stumbling around in her room and singing, hoarse and slurring, that she is drunk. “Where were you?” I called, just now, and she called back, “Noneofyourfuckingbusiness.”
Even for Shayna Hopkirk, this is unusually belligerent behavior. I’ll have to ask Bron where they went tonight, or try again with my sister tomorrow when she’s sober or the next day when her hangover has dissipated.
I sat down to write you an apology, and I found your letter lying on my desk. It truly is co-creation, Kurl, that’s exactly what this is—what we did in my tent and what we’re doing writing about it to each other, afterward. We are making something entirely new. In this case I’m grateful you took the time to write that long, eloquent account while I slept, because in case it’s not obvious from this letter, I am never very lucid upon waking.
Anyhow. I am really sorry I didn’t ask you to stay over. I’m sorry I didn’t at least take the time to explain my anxieties to you, instead of merely tossing your shoes in your general direction and mumbling, “You have to go now.”
I hope you had bus money. I hope you didn’t feel used and discarded. I hope you know that it was just as raw and intense and glorious for me as it was for you. I hope you know that right now my tent is soaked in moonlight, and that I wish more than anything that you were here to see it, because it looks like this whole earth was just reborn into an entirely new universe full of possibility.
Yours truly,
Jo