The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (10 page)

Dear voice of the heartland, hello. I shall be living here to fall into you like a stone skipped across a northern lake, so still it never stops fluttering like quiet birds skimming for insects. Loons and swallows, trout and lamplight, photographs of you against all the scenery I have ever seen. A quick taste and back into the air of my self, How should I float but across skin until my heart melts? With no desire just the brilliant fucking core?

Dear body of the headland, hello. I will wear you like the cool breath of the photographs we took last summer in Northern Ontario, With them you build me a forest and call it by your name, each leaf another reason to speak your name, slightly animal, each branch another dream. As you build me your fortress and call it by your name build me a fortress build me a fortress buildme a fortress and I will live there with you in the shade of the shade, our tent resting exactly where we placed it. It is so human to move into an empty space that way, to make it familiar by our touch.

JOURNAL ENTRY, WINTER SOLSTICE, 97
.
When we stand still we point to the north. By sitting or lying down we face many directions at once. We should remember this is ever we find we are lost.

When I think of holding you, (either against skin or in visions), my mind goes places, and the weather is never against us there, no matter what it may be. Here the elements of the world are alive (breath). All the places I have ever been are nothing without the elements, but you, with your milky face in the sky over our northern landscape, you open to where I stand here on some path and think of you. You are always either just ahead or behind. It is always so early in the morning, and in the beginning of this day the green explodes, waiting for the evening when the sun is a ghost tree, shining against it all.

A NOTE TACKED TO THE DOOR:
I am looking inside where you always are and where hope continues to be.

Toronto, 2002.

19A (97)

if I were other than I am

it could only be because I was then.

That I never entirely fell in love with the human planet

as it has been presented is not my fault. But I love you.

In looking behind, that past expands in such a way

as to make this the rotting fruit of just having lived.

Just something else to deal with. And time is such a fucking useless medium

through which to communicate. However, the knowledge

of such things couldn't possibly help. This is a poem

now, not when the past might have speeched for itself.

If I was not who I have become

it is because I was not ever then.

It is the age between things that can never be removed. We

forget we are either an age forever or we never were.

We get so tired

feeling something lost

19B (90)

this vision always begins with the road rolling over the foothills

towards the Rockies, or along a road that leads thru the mountains themselves,

then curiously shifts to every other place that could possibly be

sometimes you are present sometimes you are not

the sun is always setting and the appearance of them all against the sky

is at an angle always appreciated by

and never actually leaving them, mind always the being present

as though you couldn't possibly imagine an existance beyond

this note, this second, or these legs crossed

over one another in the back seat, young enough to know

death has no ability to respond to the nobility

of such an age growing outwardly suddenly

as dad drives silently all colour anihlates the emotions,

sitting there, 70 km/hr, thinking nothing in the boredom of driving

without sound or expression. The breeze of an open window rides

cool against that skin, this thing remembered later as only an illusion can be,

somewhere your mind went once momentarily and shared a brief

tilt with the universe

and afterward, it's either rock or tree, stone or wood or words

and earth, and words

19C (97)

yes, everyone WILL

exactly as they please.

everyone is so

outside

it has driven us crazy the pity for years and years

everyone is so out there

trapped in it all

‘Relax, the time

has not yet come.

They will behave

exactly as they have

trained for years

to become. We

are still in training'

My Dear, please restart the page.

 

My Dear, please try to

consider the past as a phenomenological study of the present.

Suck on the pit until you are high. Until the heart, squeezed

to a coal-like blossoming under the weight of all you will ever

experience, lifts, and flowers into the neck, feet, or hands.

But never the head. Don't worry. Your head is safe.

Never ever in the head. Eventually, however, the past will

sour like bored milk, and the graceful arbitrary motion of the

day will come forward, almost sexually, in fact. Consider it

a leaf pierced upon the end of a stick, turning blue, and it will

become coated with layer upon layer of silky moss until the

origin of the actual is hard to make out precisely. Turning

away the last possible thought about it. The future is so empty

in order to build the mystery. It only makes up for the lack of interest

that has ever occurred. Because I can see you there

Two Adventure Stories Not Necessarily in That Order

PART ONE
(?)

An Adventure Story Involving the Unification of All Things

Three hours later, after trying to sleep, I was in my car driving back across South Western Ontario. It was quite a stay, filled with overwhelming highs and lows, and it was troubling now that I could not seem to find an even thought on which to stand. During my drive I would occasionally take a glance upward through the bug-bespeckled windshield at a sky that held itself over the flat, dry landscape of that region, and it didn't quite appear to be the sky any more, although I was positive it was a sky: a perfectly flat sky from which the clouds hung and billowed back and forth. And the closer I came to you, the source of my actions, the more flat and blue and white the sky became, while the clouds thereof grew more and more dynamic, and golden, so that by the time I stopped there was no natural religion, there was no human religion, yet I knew that everywhere I look will be forever filled with what is not there. What a risk in that small chance of someone experiencing both sides of their mind at once! I thought it just may be a kind of exquisite sweetness I could not possibly hope to explain, but somehow know that to taste of it is to love; love of fins, breath and skin, feathers, of stone, of eyes, the shell and speech, of skulls and sheet metal, of mouth, petals, ears, of you. How peaceful is the unnaturally thoughtful space of your body! how it fits and how it is my job to find it again and again amongst the confused, broken ruins of our perfect world. And it was made clear to me that day, at the end of my adventure as I walked through the sunken doorway of our home to find you standing at the sink washing the fragile blue dishes from which we would eat, that all things, no matter how great or small the distances between them, begin in you.

PART TWO
(?)

An Adventure Story Involving the Separation of All Things

The adventure that had landed me in Point Pelee National Park at seven o'clock on a Sunday morning had been to that minute unexplainable, but finally all the pieces of my consciousness were falling into place. And it was as night speared itself upon the sun that I met the red-winged blackbirds and the cool blue-black swallows with their war-bled introductions. There were big blue carp to greet as they bubbled around us, and the occasional moss-green snapping turtle. A single great blue heron, standing as the rest of us sat around together making noise. It was all very much like an attempt on behalf of my species to meet other species at a great conference that, at least on our part, had been poorly advertised. But after watching the yellow flowers of the lily pad actually opening slowly to the morning sun I became certain that all of that world, normally thought of by our species as natural, could no longer be anything other than a collective of motion. Suddenly I was tired and hungry, exhausted in fact, and so I drove into Leamington and went to a tiny, broken down restaurant where I sat among fellow human creatures who, like me, were eating the most disgusting break-fast I have ever seen. And listening to all the useless noise gathered around me like so much flesh coloured play-dough I could not eat, nor could I look at those present. All of which did nothing to ease any of my previous suspicions: that we are all senseless and stupid and there must be a pure form of human intelligence lying elsewhere in the world, somewhere where it is not necessary. As we left the restaurant I couldn't remember having felt so confused or alone, knowing I would soon be travelling Across South Western Ontario and away from the secrets of a balanced world without thought.

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