Free The Ghosts of Jay MillAr by Jay Millar

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