#jay millar

[equatorjournal]

Jay Millar Wrapping Paper: On the Outskirts of December, 1996

[heteroglossia]

How to desire that crackle trees half empty of leaves crackle? A mind that will run their minimalist instincts through an environment only to build nests in the whole of the sky. So ghostly I recall some talk about their presence, like names for mammals, truncated communication that listens carefully to the dispersed. To listen to the wind is to see a love, the feeling of settling love.

Jay MillAr, “Wood Pages”

[wordsonpagespress]

The Trees Meanwhile, by Jay MillAr

Somewhere in the middle of the line there is this word: begin. And so I walk outside to think about that for a while, as darkness falls upon all the houses and the people who live  among their frames. Across the street the Lithuanian man  with the moustache and the interesting lisp appears and sits on  his porch chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, admiring late afternoon traffic. I am thinking about beginnings, amazed  that I am amazed by so many words, little things that pop  into my head like they were quietly meditating upon me and cause me to differentiate. These are the lyrics to your  next hit single: there’s a lake, a road, and a bunch of lonely  trees that stands together in solitary solidarity. Somehow,  it has been given to you to be someone I will think of while  I am writing this poem, a poem in which I will state: “Life is too short to have many days like this.” I will go outside, if only to lambaste myself against the ghastly face inside of which there is a tiny brain that malfunctions thoughts about beginnings, saying things that in no way resemble my  conditioning. No one would ever know that in the middle of this poem I drove all the way to Brantford to take in a baseball game. But I did. And back there, in the space before I left, I would say that in truth I am light, and quiet, and brooding,  and realize I should take the time each day in the darkness  to clearly picture the face of every person I have ever known.  Which isn’t easy, given their limited vocabulary. I think of  their faces because it’s easier than having to deal with them  in person. Why do you think of their faces? What can you read in them except “eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair, skin,”  and some form of etcetera you can’t place? But once I got to the game I could see how well being part of a team works: no matter what you are part of the team. Outside the cicada sing about the failure of summer and I feel their dying need to confess. Today I would like to be happy willingly, yet the Gods of poetry have willed it I should say nothing of myself, only quote others in the framework of belly spilling over into the glorious qualm that is time passing – I am  emotionally charged and I’m not sure what to do about it. I wonder what the economy of poetics will do about it –  the half-life of information will spare me the details, I’m sure. I’ll be dead before my writing forgets me. I have only an inkling  of anything you’d dream of beginning with an idea of the local.