The Burning Alphabet

By Barry Dempster

The Burning Alphabet confirms and extends Barry Dempster’s reputation as one of Canada’s most respected poets. Underpinning these poems, as in his previous work, there lies an unswerving dedication to emotional and spiritual honesty, clear-eyed recognitions rendered without pomp. In one section, "Sick Days", he focuses on that "other place" of chronic illness. Other poems present arguments against suicide, and explore the tropical wonders of a woman’s closet. The closing section renders, with great candour and poignancy, the powerful love-hate relationship with an aging father. Dempster writes as though it were simply natural to have speech and song cohabit with such grace. In the thick of night, when we're dreaming of corridors and Dali clocks, the soft brown bodies of bucks and does are basking in our moonlight, nibbling on the last of our lettuce leaves, scratching impressions in our sand. They are the children we wish we'd had, fleeting images of ourselves before inner lives grew blotchy, eyes heavy with 10 p.m. cop shows and those blessedly nonsensical dreams. …From "Deer""In The Burning Alphabet, mood, with all its elaborate subtleties and manifestations, both in sickness and in health, constitutes a metaphysics. I feel as though I've lived an entire inner life in these pages, wrenching, dark, and amazingly sweet." – Roo Borson. Shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry 2005; Winner of the CAA Jack Chalmers Poetry Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Apr 15, 2005
• ISBN: 9781894078979

Barry Dempster

Barry Dempster, twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award, is the author of fourteen previous collections of poetry. His collection The Burning Alphabet won the Canadian Authors’ Association Chalmers Award for Poetry in 2005. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and in 2014 he was nominated for the Trillium Award for his novel, The Outside World. He lives in Holland Landing, Ontario.

Book preview

The Burning Alphabet

Also by Barry Dempster

POETRY:

Tributaries (1978, editor)

Fables for Isolated Men (1982)

Globe Doubts (1983)

Positions to Pray In (1989)

The Unavoidable Man (1990)

Letters from a Long Illness with the World: the D.H.

Lawrence Poems (1993)

Fire and Brimstone (1997)

The Salvation of Desire (2000)

The Words Wanting Out: Poems Selected and New(2003)

FICTION

Real Places and Imaginary Men(1984, short stories)

David and the Daydreams (1985, children’s fiction)

Writing Home (1989, short stories)

The Ascension of Jesse Rapture (1993, novel)

The Burning Alphabet

Barry Dempster

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Dempster, Barry, 1952-

The burning alphabet / Barry Dempster.

Poems.

ISBN 1-894078-42-X

I. Title.

PS8557.E4827B87 2005     C811’.54     C2005-900403-7

Copyright © Barry Dempster, 2005

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

Cover art: Goodwin, Betty Roodish, Canadian, 1923 Moving Towards Fire, 1983. Oil, coloured chalks, graphite, water-colour on thin wove paper. 291 × 108 cm. (each sheet); 291 × 324 cm. (installed). Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Purchase, 1985.

With the permission of Galérie René Blouin, Montréal.

The author’s photograph is by Glenn Hayes.

The book is set in American Typewriter, Minion and Officina Sans.

Design and layout by Alan Siu.

Printed by Sunville Printco Inc.

Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

www.brickbooks.ca

For Karen

Contents

ANGEL HUSKY

EXPLICIT

HANDPRINTS

THE DEAD ELM

WHEN THE GODS DON’T LOVE YOU

A SMALL JUNGLE

DETACHED

ANGEL HUSKY

DEER

UNBELIEVABLE, AN OCTOBER POEM

CLOSET

SEX, A WISH LIST

HOW TO FORGET YOU

STORMY WEATHER

ETCETERA

MR. MEMORY

SUBURBAN POET

SICK DAYS

1/ DIAGNOSIS

2/ AFTER READING YET ANOTHER ARTICLE ON DEADLY VIRUSES

3/ MOTHER NATURE

4/SIGNS OF HEALTH

5/ IN CAMERA

6/ LOVE LIFE

7/ THE GOOD OLD FEARS

8/ GUARDIAN ANGELS

9/ SICK DAYS

10/GETTING OUT OF BED

11/MONET’S GARDEN

12/MAPLE FEVER

13/THE MOMENT

14/CHILL

15/MAKING LOVE TO A SICK MAN

16/NEW WORLD

BAD HABITS

BAD HABITS

PLURAL

THERE ARE MOODS

TAKING CARE

FOUR THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE COMMITTING SUICIDE

SOCRATES THE CATERPILLAR

SHRIEK

RECOGNITION

EVERYWHERE

THE SANGRE DE CRISTO CLOSED ROAD BLUES

THE CROWD OF HIM

FATHER-LOVE

PRETENDING

DISAPPEARING FATHERS

WINGS

ENLIGHTENED

WHERE?

MISSING PERSON

THE CROWD OF HIM

THE CAT’S MEOW

UGLY BONES

THREE LIVES/THREE DEATHS

ANGER SONG

BAD GUYS

ALL THESE BODIES

THE MAN WHO WON’T PLAY POETRY

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIOGRAPHY

ANGEL HUSKY

EXPLICIT

Above all, I cherish the explicit:

the green light at the corner

of now and then; the thrust of words

like grab and shout; the alphabetical

listings – albatross, breast, cuneiform

in The Dictionary of Dreams.

In the haze of momentary lapses

I reach for the nearest doorknob.

Coasting the tap from hot to cold.

Such confidence: flicking a switch,

unbuttoning your buttons, expelling a verb.

Even mystery has its sure

things: snakes slithering into new

skins, the closed-closet taste of Brussel

sprouts, abandoned golf balls on the moon.

How perfect those hole-in-one philosophies,

the bluntness of lotteries, the unerring

aim of flash floods, viruses,

missiles of lightning – the moment

gone straight to fate.

It’s only the forgotten or

the never tried who suddenly

die, tripping over an end table,

falling from a window that looked

just like a work of art. It’s those who

don’t know how many cigarettes

they’ve smoked, those who lose themselves

in daydreams of some special place,

those who love the ambiguity

of their deepest feelings, they’re the ones

who quietly dissolve.

The trick is: definitive, stunning

things like brandy, fluorescence, arias,

the hammer of red and blue.

Tie it all into knots: fists and

clots and first impressions, life

at its most infallible.

Feel each finger as it creates

a hand, each heartbeat billowing

a Niagara of the blood, each

thought a circle so round

it makes the moon look slack.

HANDPRINTS

After half-an-hour’s dusty drive from Los Alamos,

and another half-hour climb up a hot cliff

I found myself scrunched inside

a cave the size of a child’s playhouse,

surprisingly warm and damp

as if corpses had started to breathe again.

Paintings on the slippery walls –

square horses, empty circles,

men made of burnt sticks.

And there beside me

a crinkled handprint, fingers spread.

Touch me, I said out loud

startling the miniature echoes

from their long stupors.

My palm and the rock both sweating,

I leaned forward, my flesh

doubling its hardness, smacking

against the wall, shattering

each small grain of loneliness.

Someone long ago touched me back.

Here and now, huddled

in what little is left of Ontario’s fall

I stand by the living room window

palm prints smearing cool grey glass,

a kind of braille. Touch me:

as if someone might actually

drive down this street, make the long

climb out of their warm car

to reach me, lifelines mingling.

Is that a human being

at the window across the street

or just a stick of furniture

pressed too close to an empty curtain?

Over here, I wave, all those years of me

gathering into one small act.

After a lonely day, I lay a hard hand

on the place where my heart

chisels away at rock.

This fumbled stroke, another

smudge lost in the blur.

THE DEAD ELM

In certain moonlight, the dead elm

is Kabuki, bark the colour

of a wet ghost, branches flourishing

shadows