The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (9 page)

If you have never thought there was

a hope for yourself as a writer

or artist or human being

it only makes sense to help someone else

who might escape your fate.

writing with other names or beings

builds the emotions at all times

for whom you are a release mechanism.

greetings, hello, love is real

erotic as the banal

‘Jay MillAr says fuck you

she loves you all anyway'.

greetings to these loves

you are & have been

quite like living with all this other

AS A PERSON IN A SHELL

i appreciate your various

attempts to spell the real for me

   J.M.

ONTARIO
¹

The largest country I ever encountered is Ontario. Its many regions stretch from coast to coast, and I must admit, are rather pleasant to travel through. Each one of them have something special to offer. I must recommend to any one capable of travel: you must lift your feet up and make the effect real! However, be reminded that there is only so much of the mind to experience across any countryside. You cannot go any-where in this place without seeing all the beautiful women. Women walking, women smoking cigarettes, women talking on the phone, women riding their bicycles, women writing letters, women dancing. They make deals, go to work, take showers, attend parties (there are naked women all over the place wearing clothing, women who fall asleep in cars, laughing women, women wearing pants and sweaters). Here women write novels in their heads; there are women who speak out loud to cats. Sometimes the women cry. It is very lovely to see, but sad, too, in a way no one will never understand. These are just some of the women in our country. They are everywhere and they Keep Ontario Beautiful.

Travelling Through the Algonquin

As the moose crossed the road, she turned her head
sleepily, watching the two of us with soft dark eyes. It was
then that I witnessed one of the shapes of my love for you,
not in the moose itself, but seeing how we were to travel
much deeper into the Algonquin and into each other for that
whole week. The entire world was present, something to travel
around us and in us, and we would wake to discover we were in
it together, making it all happen. As we walk along this road
we listen to frogsongs, and it's as though we are shielded from all
sound by an invisible bubble. Everything becomes more and
more distant the closer we become. The music of the loons,
however, passed directly through us, piercing our other,
inner selves upon a tawny fox peering at us from atop this
stone embankment, carrying us away as we glide by at a
quiet speed, invisible and indivisible to everything around

Notes Toward a Poem on Our Honeymoon

There are no details of the honeymoon I will ever

offer in any public space.

These are to remain buried on that fine line somewhere balanced between my consciousness and my subconsciousness as a recurring erotic dream, separate entirely from the world others inhabit, but entirely a part of our own. However, there was one day that we emerged from our cabin recluse and drove to Pembroke Ontario and walked up and down the main street looking at the small but human people sitting in the restaurants and cafes. Later, sitting among them in a diner called ‘Cafe Guy', we looked out the front window and across and up the street into a parking lot where a small twister was twisting, picking up dust and swirling it around in such a way it appeared to be two ghost-like bodies spinning together, wrapping themselves into one. Then it snapped, and was gone

Jewel

to escape with you is my imagination

How hard is it to open up the heart all the way? I often see the oblong rolling case of time distancing itself, lengthening through my solitary work as a writer, but then to see someone walk into the wind of it, that is altogether a human vehicle. Consider, for instance, the landscape of the north. We found movement possible there, an entire breath into a cavity where we are most alive. There are so many lonely places where death is always a factor, but in the northern regions, of which there are many, there is a calm sense of openness, an empty disregard for any of the closed human systems we have to choose from. It is a landscape of possibility, which makes it unhuman, and therefore easier to fill with what is human. These arms can reach wherever they are for those roads we have travelled into the light without any fear of the speed it presents et cetera. I am never really present in these southern places of entropy and despair, because of the knowledge I have of escape. And I have actually discovered no documentation of them in the literature. However, it is the story of my life (fear) that leads me (mind) back here (afraid) because there is always the possibility that I will never see them again. But as long as there are places to go while we are here death cannot exist. So I shall invite you to relive it now.

JOURNAL ENTRY, NOVEMBER 2396
.
Living in the Ottawa Valley this year was incredible. On our first day there we climbed to the top of the hill and looked, and it was no more than an observation of what we could be as ordinary onlookers. As the wind came up over the trees there was suddenly no need for the imagination (escape) as we had needed in the city. Here it was in any part of the sky. Our tents rested under huge pines that stood beneath the misshapen clouds all summer, stood there until the deciduous began to turn. And they were ours, and we lived in them. I remember the levels of spaciousness and warmth were so huge, lying across the sky and the land, something untouchable, for we were inside what had been built for us by ourselves, through whose air the leaves are now falling sadly (becoming birds), as we make our way back to the city. Everything we heard we will remember as the voice of a time which the mind sees while we wondered what was happening before there was such a thing as thought. Sometimes I can still hear them.

I remember being the soft dirt of an unused path in the middle of the forest for two weeks. When I returned to our camp I allowed language to take the shape of a mythology that reminisced in the youthful juvenation of anyone who would listen, but only in soft green leafiness beneath the many layers of trees, and in two woodpeckers whose sound was similar to that of fire. Who had the only ears then, and in what space was the reason to fear anything at all? ((no fear) (crimson tents) (one sky)). It was by far the best death I have ever experienced, or woke to. Who really needs to be alive there was the topic for which we searched out any answer in a physical experience: a peculiar lesson directed at the empty trees surrounding our departure.

FROM A LETTER, JULY 2389
.
Dear you, can I ease your bones by saying that we rented a cottage on Manitoulin Island that August and did nothing of any importance to the world? We certainly enjoyed the mornings when we rose to eat local mushrooms gathered along the shore of the lake. There will come a day when we shall find a dead tree and sit upon it, having already gathered the necessary waters into our aprons. But it is dew we seek, not water, and therefore it shall be that much sweeter to the touch when we find it.

Eventually everything becomes how we can take the time to make love at odd hours. If we talk it becomes spirit, and we are real ghosts all the time because we can still remember what it was like to be alive. But will we ever know exactly how the past contracts and how the future expands to its full capacity within our heads? With the future present like that there can be no extinction.

JOURNAL ENTRY, AUGUST 397
.
One night we woke to discover that all the water was instead rock, and that the road was something that naturally had no end, no matter how much we longed for it. We decided we should sleep in the safe shape of the car with the rock everywhere around us, even in our dreams under the surface of the cloudless sky. We dreamt of swatches of conifer that noiselessly parried the wind along the highest evelation of road possible in this country. And my legs fell asleep. I had to get out of the car to walk it off (darkness) (station wagon) (the stars ring) high as a kite at the side of the empty road, and the whole night was alive, swarming with your sleep there. Eventually, we never made it to the Mecca of Timmins. We were going to Timmins for a wedding.

I am trying to open up my heart, but I bite my nails instead. Is it true that I have been somewhere and longed for you in the night? Your body is forever a landscape I am both familiar with and foreign to. Because it is not mine. But if I turn to face the north you are there because perhaps you are thinking about it too. You are so absolute you become perception. Watching you turns on the tactile scope for hours, a whole province, perceptive as anyone could hope to be, and Alive, What A Creature, the title of a yet unwritten poem. The purest scent of your heart is trapped by all wildlife: small woodland creatures and gentle carnivorous beasts who know exactly how to kill; plantlife such as the maple or the pine, dandelions, tulips, and bulbous root-like beings. When I witness them in their natural environment I believe I shall finally give in to the soft light and hope found in your voice or your body. And there shall be a language you have not spoken, bits of memory carried by all these creatures we have shared together or apart. In the sound of no one can tell me any other story.

JOURNAL ENTRY, SEPTEMBER 597
.
The day became so dark after the sun set, but only because we saw it falling from the beach. On the other side of the island across the bay the trees would see it disappear long after we did, in a precise manner, and we would never know their exquisite perspective as we wandered along the darkness of a road through the forest. Birds and cicadas, in fact any sound that was emitted by the forest, their technology was so frightening in the dark, for they offer keys to the possibilities we are programmed to imagine, and the overall response is terrifying, a small point aware of itself in the middle of nowhere, searching for something familiar in the outer realms of a single fading beam. We held each other's hand. It was that easy.