From: Caleb
Date: February 5, 2008 2:07:20 AM EST (CA)
To: Camille Croteau
Subject: Eastern Road

An Eastern Road


The so-called Yugoslav 'liberals' are trying to outdo their masters as ideologically loyal subjects
(Vladimir Maximov)

If the current tendency prevails, the survival of the nation will be under threat.
(Vladimir Putin)



I'm in Hintonburg. House-land. This ain't no goddamn apartment. It sits on the ground, it has a basement, there's a laundry room. I took a bus here, through the moth-like snow. I smoked at the bus stop, on the corner of my street. Let me tell you: Yesterday, I walked to the bus stop at the end of my street with my typewriter, which was in its case. I took the bus here. Then I went back home. Today, after work, I did almost the same thing. I did not bring my typewriter this time, though. I have my notebook, and a book by Mihajlov. That's all I need. I smoked a cigarette while waiting for the bus. It felt good to smoke, having finished a long shift. And now I'm here in Hintonburg, in a yuppie's house, at a black table. In the fridge, there's a jar of vegetarian bolognese and half an avocado wrapped in plastic. I am eating pita and hummus. This hummus has cayenne in it. I have crackers on my lap.

So on my way through house-land, past the small bakeries which are closed for the night, past the one-hundred and seventy-one fair-trade coffee-shops, to Clive St., I thank God for my new socks which are warm and for the sea-salt on the potato chips I ate on the bus. I look up but there are no stars. It is a cloudy night. It's snowing. I can feel the tension running through the world. I can feel the tension in the city's shoulders. The snowflakes fall sideways, tugged persistently by thousands of invisible lines. Smoke is pulled magnetically across the horizon. Clouds dip down to the earth. Yeats said: The centre cannot hold.

*
I thank God for socks and for sea-salt, I wash the dirt from my hands in the snow, I put the end of my cigarette on a windowsill and keep walking. The tension going through the world is obvious tonight. It leaves me without much hope. Mihajlov seems to think that the human spirit is approaching its renaissance, but I can't see the evidence.

*

Ben, the seasons are changing too quickly. Even the son of the right hand must admit defeat occasionally. Lucie, the smoke is too thick. Some poets, like Shelley, are almost eternal. But I do not want to live forever. I don't even try to write that kind of stuff. I write extremely personal poetry which is fairly honest and sometimes beautiful and not terribly interesting. Like Tony Bennett, I left my heart in San Francisco. Someone put my heart on a bus and it ended up in Seattle. I went down from Vancouver to collect it. That was the summer of 2001.

Like the fallow ground, I resist you. I make my shields impenetrable and, consequently, unintentionally, I suffocate the things inside. The light, the heart, and so on. Heavy bags on an Eastern road. Northward on that road. She asked me if I'd love her forever, and I said, Yes. It seemed possible and it felt good to say. Ah it breaks in me now. The mountains and the water and the sun and the moon. The climax is part of life, as is the falling asleep afterward. As is the warm movement of whiskey through my chest. As is the chaos in my voice. As is the tension in the clouds. As is the smoke over the city and the dirty windows of the bus. Sometimes I feel fine and sometimes I feel shitty, and that's ok, I guess.

Sometimes we were picked up by drivers, but mostly we preferred to walk. Sea-birds went over us, some species of bird, I don't know which. We were walking Northward on an Eastern road up Cape Breton Island.

*

Driftwood Provincial Park, at the end of June, before the summer students came. It was almost empty. The warden had left for the night. We were on our way to Thunder Bay. We set up the tent and built a fire. Matthew was drinking rum and coke and I was drinking whiskey. We were sitting in our lawn chairs by the fire. Matthew went to use the bathroom at the compound about a hundred yards away. I waited for about half an hour, drinking whiskey and eating bread that I would toast over the coals, watching the river go darkly Southward. Then I went to see where Matthew was. I walked to the compound. He was stepping through one of the doors, naked.
- What the hell are you doing, I said.
- Taking a shower, he said.
I opened the door. Inside was a large room with a shower and a floor drain. I thought that was wonderful and took my clothes off and went in. I stood under the hot water for maybe ten minutes. Then I went back outside and down to the fire. Matthew and I took a walk through the park, naked, drunk, and there was the sound of the wind in the trees and the muttering of the river.

From: Camille Croteau
Date: February 5, 2008 9:52:02 AM EST (CA)
To: Caleb
Subject: Re: Eastern Road

Your e-mail in my inbox really stood out among the others today. It looked at the one from my boss and brushed it away in one clean swift sweep. It grabbed the one from my fussy client by the neck and pinned it down effortlessly. It layed down for a nap with the one from my sweet sister, who always says the kindest things to me. It smiled and shook hands with the one from my friend in California who is asking me to come down south in the summertime and, when it suddenly noticed the one from the ex-lover who treated me like shit, it drop-kicked his with great power, courage and a loud roar. In the end, half of my e-mails trembled or lay crumpled next to yours, and the other half beamed and looked up gratefully.

I lost myself in that message, and I find myself immersed in its realm still, the end of it especially, gripping the edges of my inbox and trying to swing my long legs back into the chair across the computer. But I dove into it so deeply that I have become one of its characters, an intruder showing up with an awkward mix of shyness and grandeur. I now am naked and still feel the water dripping from wet hair onto my body from a warm shower, I am walking through grass in a field, I've high-fived some boy named Matthew with a smile, I've got sea-salt on my lips and a cigarette hanging from the side of my mouth, with my eyes squinting slightly at you. And all the while my co-workers wonder where the hell I've disappeared to.