Invisible Dogs

By Barry Dempster

Virtuosic poems tracking two intertwined themes: the breakdown of an obsessive love affair and the vicissitudes of middle age.

Invisible Dogs, Dempster's fourteenth collection, is a complex but deeply coherent hymn to the difficult business of staying alive. This is a book for when it hurts so bad you hope you'll die and are afraid you won't—not because it offers consolation or the promise of a new dawn, but because it so compellingly documents the plain, hard, ungraceful, stumbling grief of the matter, and meets it with rare self-knowledge, wry humour, and an unornamented determination to go on living.

Dempster's metaphors are like hairpin turns taken at breakneck speed. He has nerves of steel when it comes to self-examination, and it's this relentless honesty and the emotional torque it induces that keep the voice on the road.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781926829951

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

INVISIBLE DOGS

INVISIBLE DOGS

BARRY DEMPSTER

BRICK BOOKS

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Dempster, Barry, 1952–, author




Invisible dogs / Barry Dempster.

Poems.

ISBN 978-1-926829-95-1

I. Title.

PS8557.E4827I58 2013     C811'54     C2013-904019-6

copyright © Barry Dempster, 2013

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The author photo was taken by Francesca Aceti.

The cover image is Stutter by Robert Cadotte, courtesy of the Bau-Xi Gallery.

The print edition of the book is set in Minion Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach and released in 1990 by Adobe Systems.

Print design and layout by Cheryl Dipede.

Printed and bound by Sunville Printco Inc.

Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

www.brickbooks.ca

for Karen

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Virtuosic poems for anyone who has ever survived a broken heart or made it past fifty.

Invisible Dogs, Dempster’s fourteenth collection, is a complex but deeply coherent hymn to the difficult business of staying alive. This is a book for when it hurts so bad you hope you’ll die and are afraid you won’t—not because it offers consolation or the promise of a new dawn, but because it so compellingly documents the plain, hard, ungraceful, stumbling grief of the matter, and meets it with rare self-knowledge, wry humour, and an unornamented determination to go on living.

Dempster’s metaphors are like hairpin turns taken at breakneck speed. He has nerves of steel when it comes to self-examination, and it’s this relentless honesty and the emotional torque it induces that keep the voice on the road.

CONTENTS

THERE’S A HOLE IN THE WORLD

COLD

ON HIS WAY TO BONES

OBSESSED

THE OYSTER CAFE

NO-SHOW

ARE THERE VIPERS IN BANGKOK?

INTIMACY

THE PINK SOCK

GOD FALLS INTO YOUR STRIDE

MORE THAN YOU REALIZE

VIGILANCE, A CAT’S STARE

CHICKADEES

THE LISTENER

LITTLE LIGHT

SHE SAID/HE SAID

1/ VIVIAN FOREST

2/ ANY MIRACLE

3/ SECOND SKIN

4/ DISTANCE

5/ A FEW BONES LEFT

6/ SOMETHING OF HERSELF

7/ CLICK

8/ IRRETRIEVABLE

9/ NEW DAY

10/ OVER YOU

11/ BLOWN AWAY

12/ DOORS

13/ AROMATIC

14/ LANDMARKS

15/ HIM

16/ DAILY

17/ STARTING OVER

18/ SHINING

19/ GO ON LOVING

ROCKY VARIATIONS

MOUNT RUNDLE

KILL SITE

COMPANY

BEAR STORY

ROCKY VARIATIONS

WISH LIST

A PIECE OF YOURSELF

THE WAY DOWN

SKUNK HOUR

GHOST STORY

GOING UNDER

GOING UNDER

HOUSE AND HOME

BITTERSWEET

GROIN

GOD-SIZED ACHE

A CRYING POEM

AIMLESS

BARE TREES

WALKING AWAY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882

THERE’S A HOLE IN THE

WORLD

COLD

There’s a hole in the world,

cold threading through like a wasp’s

stinger. At first you freeze,

flurries shooting head to toe

until you can’t tell your fingerprints

from the whorls of frost numbing

your knees. But slowly you adapt,

ice becoming a permanent part

of your cheek. You pray courage,

let yourself feel the blizzard, an even

smaller hole pierced in the breastbone,

another buzz stinging its way somewhere

soft and red. This is when you realize

the world is riddled with cold:

dead stars in the orbit of a last gaze,