Free The Ghosts of Jay MillAr by Jay Millar Page A

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.
    Â 
    â€˜
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 Alex 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
    understands your poems, but thanks to you
    i now have more time
    to consider the artwork of the clouds.
    Â Â Â J.M.
    Prelude to a Perfectly Ordinary Dream
    lying in bed this morning
    light start wakes the window
    all present so it might hold the sight of the blood
    to see it pulse her neck is to see
    how the skin jumps
    absolutely alive in the memory
    these dreams
    every morning we stopped at the same restaurant for breakfast
    the same restaurant somewhere in the midwest
    until we knew we weren’t going anywhere
    driving a day at a time and arriving at the same place we left
    though the restaurant became a little more chaotic each morning
    not so it was uncomfortable, but so we could take the time to notice
    waitresses smashing into each other, flocks of dishes flying,
    one morning the cash register fell over