by Jay Millar
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.
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
&nbs
p; 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.
Or
Or the wind covers so much ground and won’t even think of you. High wind, White sky. Or you miss it and close the window. Think of the cicadas and the beer. The middle of August. Or you don’t even notice. Driving Across South Western Ontario. Or the open sky along the trees like a door. Or the doorway and the windowsill and the wind. Waiting for the cicadas who are not there. Remember the front porch, the two of us. Thinking. Or the breeze through the leaves. Or today thinks about becoming night. Hot, lazy, breezy and loud. Or you open the window against the flimsy crickets making the sky red. five minutes. Driving Across South Western Ontario. Or remember the cicadas at four in the morning in Windsor Ontario. Or remember the cicadas in the afternoon in Toronto Ontario. The sound of a guitar, the voice that goes with it. Talking with the wind. Or you think of the cicadas in Windsor Ontario and drive. Hear the flimsy crickets. Or the wind. Or You Point To The Sky. Driving Across South Western Ontario. You think and it’s there. Or the sweat on your back. Or the heavenly traffic. The swish of the cars, this engine’s rattle. Or the wind finds you and you think it cares. Awake at dawn in the basement. Or was it dawn talking. We were talking, couldn’t see it was light. Falling asleep and the music. Or you tumble down the past, five years. Perhaps there was a pattern inherent all that time. Or the cigarettes and the beer. The smoke and the pattern. Driving Across South Western Ontario. Just imagine the cicadas and the crickets in Lucan Ontario. Or the clouds that were in the sky for breakfast on the patio. All the clear white near the horizon in Windsor Ontario. Tired and hungry. Stiff back, high country. Or nothing but a cup of coffee. The things that have just never been said until now. Or we pause for a moment and 125 km/hr. Somewhere in Ontario. The music might make you cry. The simple guitar and the voice. Driving Across South Western Ontario.
A Report to the Revolutionaries of That Period2
For a world once filled with such modern [unreadable] it was certainly became void of any feeling. This was our interpretation of this strange place. Years we spent there, and in the urban centres that remained standing for all that time we noticed that those bodies severed at the neck did not smile. Not that the head was actually missing, but that it was never put to [unreadable]. We should know. We were there. Our humble [unreadable] were constantly picking up strange frequencies. We discovered through the close study of arbitrary documents the species is famed for that these were some of the many areas that had been nicely [word unknown] in the past and were now lost forever, only to be minutely heard with the correct equipment - But why this one parasite in particular, referred to in subsequent reports as the [word unknown], grows as it does across the species, its source located in the [word unknown], and how, or why, everything comes to it by the strange habit of [word unknown] the fourth dimension, turning the very moments of the day into the solidity
of a commodity, remains one of the culture’s greatest [unreadable]. For in their youth they had ideas, and they lived by them. Perhaps in the years to come, as [word unknown] learns the better of itself, all will be becoming as we once were, and will return to a [word unknown] notion of time. But now, deep within the various experiments of the present that have been [unreadable], many of our observers have returned somewhat affected, as though this buzz persists and amplifies wherever it can, and we are now left wondering if perhaps [unreadable] we missed the point, as it were, living so deeply in our forts of love and [The remainder of this document was not readable]
Why Do They Call it a Towel
i never actually wanted to know what it was i was eating but every one was always so insistent on telling me to stand up straight, mind your manners, look both ways and then cross on that fine line between any-thing you could make your mind up to walk along, be completely suspicious and terrified of everything around you, dark green shit in the toilet, it’s a rainy day in June and life is sweet and sour, something is rotting in the garbage can so i have to spend five minutes cleaning it out, there are all these moments that pass and pass along a little message, and then it’s clean and everything continues, when i left the reading the other night i was followed out by the scraping footsteps of a lonely poet, drunk enough to be called a heckler, led away after asking one of the readers ‘What Do You Know?’ William said ‘They’re kicking him out because he never published a real book,’ but he stood off to the side, looking over his shoulder and trying to maintain his balance at the same time, when i left Bob was attempting to read something, i walked past the heckler who flat out asked me with great concern ‘Where’s the projection of the poem?’ and i had to agree i couldn’t find it either, he followed me out scraping his feet like a very demon behind me and i broke out into laughter, there are all these moments that pass and pass along a little message, who are all these people and what are they doing here? walking along Bloor street today the air was all around me, cool but humid, making my shirt stick to my skin and my skin to the meat that’s sticking to my bones, why is it that i am the only one that’s dying while everyone else just continues to rise, we all smoke dope, we’re all perverted, we all long for the tall cool frothy peace of death in our own pathetic lonely ways, we all want to take it on like an afternoon nap, a nightcap in the morning, we are all cowards, ignoring the inevitable in interesting ways, all these moments that pass and pass along a little message, the library was closed but i got to talk with this guy named Skye, named after the island where i thought maybe he had been conceived, who was sitting on the steps eating a triple decker peanut butter sandwich and telling everyone who dared to walk up the steps that the library was CLO-OSED, and he told me his philosophy of life which is,