is the author of

Ivan’s Birches



 

published by
 

Pedlar Press

Barry Dempster is the author of the novel The Ascension of Jesse Rapture, a

Children’s book, David and the Daydreams, two volumes of short stories, and

eleven collections of poetry, the two most recent being Love Outlandish from

Brick Books and Ivan’s Birches from Pedlar Press.  His previous collection,

The Burning Alphabet, gained him his second Governor General¹s Award

nomination and went on to win the Canadian Authors’ Association Chalmers

Award for Poetry.  Dempster has also won a Confederation Poets’ Prize, a

Petra Kenney Award, a Scarborough Bi-Centennial Award, and a Prairie Fire

Poetry Prize.  This coming October, Dempster begins a second stint as

Writer in Residence at the Richmond Hill Public Library.   He has also

served as mentor at several residencies at the Banff Arts Centre, including

the Poetry Studio and the Wired Writing Workshop, as well as running

workshops in places as diverse as Holland Landing, Ontario and Santiago,

Chile.  He is presently senior editor at Brick Books.

Barry has given us one poem:

IVAN’S BIRCHES

In Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood,

the birch trees are celebrities,

lit from within with a desperate need

to be seen.   I followed them through

the dark, sticky rows of the old

Roxy, aching to join them on screen,

brush against their papery heat

until my skin was a high voltage white.   

My first brazen love affair with ghosts.

Today, guzzling spring like someone

with a desert in his gut, I ramble

through a Simcoe County forest, my palms

sticky with buds, counting off footsteps,

as if the more ground I cover

the faster colour will come.   I’m heady

with visions of May, blistering violets

and tongue-wet trilliums, ready to

walk until I’ve awakened the entire woods,

from the interjections of tree toads

to those stream of consciousness snakes.

But I never expected this sudden swarm

of birches, just beyond that swell of cedar,

across the amber creek.   A dozen or more,

nuns in nightgowns celebrating

their uncommon love.   Without planning,

I duck down in the underbrush, thinking

Russia, thinking childhood and its

incandescent dreams, careful not to

snap a dead leaf or release a scent of greed.

Feeling barely one dimension, so

distant from the light that I can’t even

claim shadow rank, hunched in the same

debris as budding June bugs

and centipedes with their growing pains.

The watcher never belongs, creeping

around the periphery of sight and desire.   

All that white nakedness, the powdery

tips of a woman’s fingers, the height

of a man reaching for the sky

as he closes the afternoon blinds.   

All together, swaying towards touch,

glowing with the kind of consciousness

where beauty breaks out on a branch or stem,

where something out of what appears

to be nothing is the closest Ivan

and the rest of us come to miracles.   

Once upon a time, looking was an active verb,

Tarkovsky the camera sidling up to the birches.

He made me turn backwards in my seat, searching

for the source of all that light, a tiny window

at the back of the theatre, pouring white

on white, weaving a screen for the birches to fill,

for the children in us all to bask under,

to believe in ghosts and not be afraid.

Mid-forest, a pine watches me ignore it,

as it learns that falling in love has more to do

with haunting than being understood.

My eyes, my pores, my possibilities, all brimming

with birches.   All I need to do is stand up,

ignore the shouts of those who claim I’m blocking

the imagery, walk towards the screen, beyond

the realm of cedars and creeks, into the pale

negative space of Tarkovsky’s dreams.   

And here, reach out, bark as silky

as the necks and wrists of celebrities

who spend their lives soaking up beams.