( from ) Wood Pages

Jay Millar

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.

Autumn: some landscape the edges of the skies pulled
toward the earth for leaves to kick up the wind.

Can you sense the moment leaves halt for a fleeting
distraction of silence? Walking listens aloud

for the sound. What all the nameless creatures name. Some
relationship between two species in which one

obtains nutrients from the bodily function
of the other. Or could you possibly hear how

long the walk to chorus-less songs the lingual tics
are as likely as any to empty into.

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Jay MillAr is a poet, editor, bookseller and publisher. Born in Edmonton in 1971, he was raised in London Ontario by his parents, a zoologist and a music teacher. For the past 11 summers he has collected data on white-footed mice in a woodlot near Tilbury Ontario for a population Biologist at Lakehead University. A small press advocate, MillAr publishes various things by himself and other under the imprint BookThug, and sells these books as well as other small press and poetically minded literature through Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe, an imaginary bookstore specializing in the books that no one wants to buy.

The poems presented here are from Jay's forthcoming Greenboathouse chapbook Wood Pages.