ISSUE 24: WINTER 2014

Three Poems

Conceptual Poetry

That’s when you pulled out the Sapphic quartet— reminisced bitterly on the subject of women who reverse their direction seasonally in response to root systems. ‘It’s fine’ is what you said, finally taking up the harp of your father ‘I can harvest emoticons for their personal value.’ Yet the whales drone on and pleasure amends history. You’ll learn—functioning badly in a large dream is an even larger version of time travel, a marvelous application. Slower than oceans, less firm than nouns, deep in whose depths great mammals display the sonorous we-shall-inherit-the- earth melodies that deny you wait. One day you’ll feel the holes.

  Tropes Left By Forebearers No one snuffs the world out but your eyes Or calls the objects they see slight— Somewhere under a sky that has been broken By knowledge and understanding There is a pattern brewing in the logic of the day— Can you yet see how far we've come In the withering length of time stretching? The milieu today is confusing, yes But that might just be the heads we had once, Or the spring we once lived in, where everything Was possible and we were excised and new And the world didn't have a sky We could understand yet, just the one that was So terrific to stare at and sparkle and work. And now, with our hearts heavy, We have reached something. This is how we scratch our heads now. With a trowel. I mean with the word “trowel.” In our pretty landscapes there are angles of birds Swarming across the colors we procure: Moss and horizon and toad and thrush, a stylistic reminder to be youthful and procure. As now as we look at paintings by 20th Century masters we are shocked By what we imagine as a decline of humanity. It isn't difficult to feel that slippage away from The smallness, away from that which is ancient and mystical, Shot in black and white against an archival backdrop We are now something shiny and bright and bewilderingly huge That surrounds us in the present. The cleanliness Of our moment, made so crystalline by the ease With which we access recognizable information, This is what echoes through our time timelessly: More and more and more trouble with the obvious.

How Light Pours from the Darkness

Sometimes you can actually see a poem. Say you are floating in a canoe along The Humber River one evening And you notice you are alongside a Cormorant who is eyeing you— You feel a series of words That will capture this moment Perfectly, a moment you and the Bird are sharing in the stillness Of the growing darkness. And you Feel these words until you can see them Almost like type on a page, right there And your son in the back of the boat Sneezes and the bird disappears beneath the surface of the water. Watching the ripples expand from where The bird vanished, you have an epiphany— It probably wouldn’t have been a very good Poem anyway, there would have been Too much artifice to it, it would have Been too precious, a perfect example Of a Canadian nature poem. So you Paddle onward. Further downstream You look up and notice all the cormorants, Hundreds of them, perched at the tops Of the trees growing along the shore.  

About the author

Jay MillAr is a Toronto poet, editor, publisher, teacher, and virtual bookseller. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which are the small blue (2008), esp : accumulation sonnets (2009), Other Poems (2010), and Timely Irreverence (2013). He is also the author of several privately published editions, such as Lack Lyrics, which tied to win the 2008 bpNichol Chapbook Award. MillAr is the shadowy figure behind BookThug, a publishing house dedicated to exploratory work by well known and emerging North American writers, as well as Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe, a virtual bookstore that specializes in the books that no one wants to buy. Currently, Jay teaches creative writing and poetics at George Brown College and Toronto New School of Writing.