The Ghosts of Jay MillAr by Jay Millar

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