by Jay Millar
and i quote: ‘I’m 34,1 guess I’d better start thinking about an RRSP because unemployment can only go so far, that guy Mike Harris, he’s an asshole/and i don’t tell him that even tho Harris is a complete prick i don’t think he’s all bad since he is causing a kafuffle, something that might be good for Canadians at this point in our career, and Skye mean-while is heavily troubled by science fiction, it makes him as ‘what if?’ too many times about any given situation, there are all these moments that pass and pass along a little message, and walking home i discover in an alley an entire collection of Russian music waiting for the trash and the kids hanging outside the men’s club waiting for their fathers to finish their beer waiting for the game to end help me pick out which ones to take with me, ‘Take that one’, the boy with the purple stains at the corners of his mouth says, ‘I made that’, the cover of the album is purple with half a treble clef on it, it’s called USSR Bolshoi Theatre and he says ‘I made that’, and i believe him, i pick out seven or eight records and get up to leave and the oldest kid there says ‘Hey, why’s he takin the CDS’ and i explain to him that someone left them in the alley for me to find, some gentle soul who wants me to explore the music of the four corners of the earth, and i can see right away that he doesn’t believe me so i ask him if they’re his and he looks dumbfounded, he’s playing a hand-held Nintendo game and i can tell he wants to get back to his game, so i ask him if he knows who’s records they are and he shrugs his shoulders and turns back to his game and i walk off, there are all these moments that pass and pass along a little message, and i come home and start to write a little poem about the other morning when i was getting out of the shower thinking about how sweet life is when everything is wet and i asked you ‘why do they call it a towel?’ and you said you didn’t know and you were beautiful, beautiful as the tiny soprano voice on the purple record the kid had made peeling out that high beautiful note that hangs on the air in so many innocent ways, making me think there are all these moments that pass and pass along a little message
I came to be where I was 5 minutes ago
The first thing I ever tried to learn was how
unfolding as I began to write without fear or knowing what next
The Pail and the Shovel. An idea continued to perform outwardly
for hate, for revenge, because these were the things that happened,
it had become clear thro the ages, anything was permitted to be
Red Sunset over The Lake. A Tree Broken of Leaves. The Beach
Which is Now. And there were those who dried out
looked at from the side, a Space in which each poem is perfectly
it becomes a poem, nothing more. And still you were running
looping into themselves to catch the little mayflies in their beaks,
I am thankful it is your light, my eye, and all of that
5 minutes ago where I was I came to be
Recognising that there was the ridiculous nature of being
‘Pale grey horse of the abattoir, rising’. For this was the mark,
the many tricks like a trained gull. Hovering for glory, for love,
And we let them happen, for we were living in a time, when, as
written across a sky of such blank air. As Long As It Was There.
And The Cool Water. There You Go, running as if you had wings.
To follow those one-eyed pigeons of that notion. Literature
chiselled, perfectly sounded and polished still High Buff: from
an idea across the sand, until you stopped to see the swallows
Light As Air the Snap and Swallow. And for that, my love,
with which to see.
Critique of the Living
There have always been
five things in a row:
footprints, or to speak of
whatever happens
at any free moment:
feet first
______,
______, ______,’ (SPEECH)
______,
______,
The second takes on five things of its own
Other times the third is
away if it grows bored.
Is time pure reason?: think;
Think the fifth shy stick upon which
birds sit in the present, singing of what is
happening in that moment
‘Each day the five, present
after the other, grow into
his eyes to find row after row
of the mental creature
one who moves along
in sneakers, until I finally reach
about where I am in the world
that repeats after yesterday in
changes are subtle, finding out
where I was yesterday, or
tomorrow, where ever one
can see above their many heads’.
And I might wake with a start:
the morning. And, to boot,
in such a way that some
become something new.
Critique of the Dying
Of the fingers, or
to find itself being meditated upon, great Death
of the day, held or otherwise
these various forms. Sometimes it has
other times it is translucent
but takes its own time to walk up and down
And it grows bored. That fourth
quite rare moment, a shy
time lingers on and sings.
prepare the self for one
mental creature who has opened
two windows, and here are discoveries
designated to be alive at this time.
Building quietly in a green shirt,
what amount of understanding could be
rearing itself in today? Alive,
here to notice that the
not that much different from
will be tomorrow. And I will be
another sky of rare
things retreating in that order.
Something to do will be again
in always disappear
(They may actually change
be content in what I do.)
His Face Looked Like Satie
Sounds
Max could lie there for hours
near the fireplace, then jump aside
sideways and become someone else’s
dog for the rest of the afternoon.
Sometimes I liked it when he was
my dog, other times I like to pretend
I was borrowing him from the neighbours.
During the winter we’d go running
together through the night air around the
block and I would run as fast as I could
with him running the same speed,
just ahead of me, and I would fall
to the ground and let him pull me
across the ice and snow by his leash.
Sometimes I could slide 30, 40 feet.
It was a stupid thing to do. Maybe
I could have broke his neck, but he
never complained or let out a yelp or
anything. When we stopped moving
he would always come back and sniff
at me, making sure that I fell down
because I wanted to. I knew lying
there in the flat silence of winter that
he liked making sure I was okay. One
time his leash snapped, but I said
he’d pulled too hard, excited by some
bitch. He was a little crazy and we
all knew it was possible. By 1990
my parents realized that Max was a
farm dog, so we moved to the country.
Max was happy there, and he roamed
about without the confusion of the
maze-like suburban landscape he
grew up in. It fit his brain better,
and as his brain grew to a comfortable
dog size, he kept to himself, runnin
g
and running around the back wood
lot, sniffing at everything to make
sure it was all okay, until he came
home one afternoon in 1992 limping
and shaking, covered with mud and
blood. Looking embarrased that
the pack of stray dogs had gotten
the better of him down by the creek
again. And that night he died. It’s the
look on his face I hallucinate from time
to time, at moments of flat stillness
against the light, a look somewhere
between pain and shame, his head hung
low as he comes in through the screen
door at the back of the kitchen, shaking
and amazed that all those assholes had
been allowed into the world. We buried
him in the back yard, just north of the
garden, and Mom cried even tho she’s
a toughie, so I tried (after looking into
her soft eyes) to justify it all by thinking
youthfully of how Max was now free to run
as he pleased, Dog Of The Four Winds,
a great sniffing spirit. But as I thought
this he just lay there in a black garbage bag
as dad shovelled the dirt back on top.
Postscript:
Today, new years day, 1997, there is someone
pulling me across the cold ice of the world,
and today I share his amazement.
In Another Shimmering Lifetime
(an attempt at memory for you)
January 1390
1 Picture everyone there loving strangers, met only a few months earlier, their various shapes friendly, filled with chatter. Each of them easily a non-threatening member of an anonymous group of people that did exist once, during the patch-work lifetime of someone who could make their acquaintance and disappear soon enough. In the dark living room, a television flashes dull bluish streaks across bodies and brown bottles; quiet sentences are heard as they pass back and forth between people. Through the doorway to the kitchen a bright land can be seen, where voices climb, and never dare to fall. In that blaze I can see my father sitting around the wooden table with his voice. Those sitting at the table are welcome inside the sound of it, not only as pieces of the discussion, but as a source for the gentle interplay of mind. A space is present there, where youth has forged a middle-aged being out of challenge and intrigue, a mind that appears to be enjoying his quick rallies, a kind of professing sage, drinking beers like the rest them, a man who has looked behind himself through those present before him, who has suddenly found himself back at university, this time at the actual pinnacle of a conversation from the vantage point of his own future. My attention is back in the living room where laughter suddenly jumps up and heads for the washroom. Two girls sit cross-legged in front of the television. One of them giggles and a flower blooms, from the top of her head, and begins to shine in purples, yellows, and in the attempt to hold all of my attention, but wilts away when the five guys sitting across the couch, each one on their fourth or fifth beer, laugh at a joke about her ass she does not hear. There are others in the room too, figures who are coated in shadow, mysterious beings who at this moment are further away from my mind, ghosts whose voices can be heard warbling over the television like this seven year-old tape recording of themselves. And the colours there, in that room, grow mouse-like with each stupid gesture, each one a tiny scampering of emotion and fear.
2 Looking into the kitchen my father has vanished.
Outside he is building a bonfire in a snowdrift.
We all crowd the window, amazed at this, totally our discovery,
and as we admit the novelty of this moment,
we throw on coats and boots and head out in search of light.
Merry once again, finally, and in our drunkenness
we have become wholly unconsciously blind to the ugly possibilities of the season.
This is the whole night, what it became in the years to come.
In the future, which is part man, part woman,
there will always be this rage against our darker emotions,
against the cold nature we all come to know as human beings.
A goof-ball escapade of youth trapped forever in the shimmering air,
close to the nostrils and the mouth and the eyes, giving warmth.
This feeling finally solidified around midnight,
as the soccer match exploded into the empty luminescence of the cornfield,
under the mothball light of a full moon; and the girls
choosing to remain huddled near the fire talked about it,
choosing to ignore the drunken shouts of boys
kicking at the black and white ball dad produced from the garage,
aiming each shot between makeshift oil-drum goal posts to the east and to the west,
they talked about it in whispers.
On the field there are the sounds of crunching snow and crazy laughter,
they plow into each other for hours, not even keeping score; around the fire
there can be heard the quiet warmth of the fire glow,
as it licks at their feet, in praise of the night,
that which knows the soft heady warmth of morning,
and the remembrance of dreams.
And between these places I have travelled in one night,
and at each point that I remained still I was one of the people of that place.
(Dad stands near the fire talking and grinning,
he is watching the soccer game with his back to the fire,
he will throw on a log or two to keep it going,
the same way he has all night long
throwing matter into our minds for us to use.)
3 And the soccer game was suddenly a stupid ball
caught in a momentum directed either to the east or the west,
without purpose or resolve, finally to stand in someone’s footprint marker.
And the fire to which we returned was cheery, but tiring to look at,
and it slowed us down, somehow, and the night grew suddenly lonely and apart
and the heaviness of the air came to sit upon our breath.
And cars began to disappear from the driveway.
And Dad said goodnight and went into the house to bed.
And we had to coax someone from the bushes,
reassuring him that she had not been overly embarrassed by his actions.
And afterward, to let everyone know he was fine, he tackled me,
diving over one of the blue and white oil drums in the dark blur of memory,
knocking the wind out of me for five long minutes.
And the colours of the night began quietly to recede then,
as I lay there near the fire, in the white darkness of the snow.
Feel the teenage rush of it all again receding, under the snowball moon,
a groaning beneath the dark sway of the pines.
And my breath will hang for all time, like grey angels or tiny stars,
in my mind or the black sky;
there.
Endnotes
1 There are so many women in our country blissfully unaware of how beautiful they are. Please be aware she makes all of you beautiful even if you don’t want to be.
2 One could look towards and learn from the popular engravers of that period. Their methods by which to remove so many of the unnecessary layers, or by which to fruitfully ignore them, were not only ingenious, but easily imitative. Sadly, these have been lost to the world forever.
‘have met at least nine incarnations of my wife to date, and I have to admit that each one of them has been incredibly patient while the drunken orangutan was writing, but you should see all of them walk into a room together, no one on this planet could hope to write like that!’
-from H, Azel’s Dream, Book Thug 1999
portrait of H. Azel by A
lex Cameron
Perfectly Ordinary Dreams
James Liar
I always wanted someone to follow me around
from day to day who could write down my
dreams so i could look at them from
outside myself like flowers or
teapots or clouds. my regards to the fiction of the
moment, you are the sweetest being i ever knew,
a tall blonde colour’d shadow,
biographer of all the moments i wasn’t
paying attention to my own mind.
Not Possible.
how could i possibly hope to
disregard my own mind?
i’m sorry you get all the credit and no one