HYMN

Also by John Barton

Poetry

A Poor Photographer

Hidden Structure

West of Darkness

Great Men

Notes Toward a Family Tree

Designs from the Interior

Sweet Ellipsis

Hypothesis

Poetry Chapbooks

Destinations, Leaving the Map

Oxygen

Shroud

Runoff

Asymmetries (In the House of the Present and The Strata)

Editor

Silences

belles lettres / beautiful letters

We All Begin in a Little Magazine: Arc and the Promise of Canada’s Poets, 1978–1998 (with Rita Donovan)

Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets (with Billeh Nickerson)

HYMN

John Barton

Brick Books

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Barton, John, 1957–
Hymn / John Barton.

Poems.
ISBN 978-1-894078-76-4

I. Title.

PS8553.A78H94 2009      C811’.54      C2009-902314-8

Copyright © John Barton, 2009

We acknowledge 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.

The cover painting is by Attila Richard Lukacs: Three Boys,
mixed media on canvas, 54” X 44.5”, 1998.

The author photograph was taken by Diana Tegenkamp.

The book is set in City BQ and Sabon.

Design and layout by Alan Siu.

Printed and bound by Sunville Printco Inc.

Brick Books
431 Boler Road, Box 20081
London, Ontario N6K 4G6

www.brickbooks.ca

In memory of my father

Men yearn for poetry, though they may not confess it…
                                            —E. M. Forster

Contents

I

Aide-Mémoire

II IDEOGRAMS

This Cabinet

Caught in the Updraft

The Piano

Ideogram, in the Half-Light

Free Associations

Geology of the Body

Persona

Shopping at Capers

Hallelujah

Inwards

Pathetic Fallacy

Le Tombeau de Sylvia Plath

Installation in Homage to Gathie Falk

Foul Bay at 2 AM

Anxiety

Frieze

Aquarium

Saumon Fumé

On Evia

This Land Is Our Land

Runoff

III NARRATIONS

In the House of the Present

The Strata

Sombrio Beach

The Troubles

Asymmetries

IV HYMNS

Excerpt from a Travel Journal

Eros

Him

10 Lines for X

Way Finding

Fucking the Minotaur

Man of Your Dreams

Our Embrace: Random Études, 1 Through 4

Pastoral

Divertissement

Pastiche

Caprice

Warhol

Portal

A Boys’ Own, with Queen

Sandy Hill Gothic

Hymn

Amnesia

Days of 2004, Days of Cavafy

The Afterlife

V

Polygonics

Acknowledgements

I

Aide-Mémoire

First there was the dancer

                                     then the refugee

                                                            then the gambler

and, counting back

wards at random, the anaesthetist

the adjuster, the interior designer known for

his way with gilt and feathers, the former military

adviser who still liked to trail men undercover followed

by the tv actor whose agent died afraid he would contract aids

the librarian who collated records about his lovers into alphanumeric

order (access points being size and chat name only), including Scam, the squeegee

boy with goose-fleshed skin who reeked of WINDEX, and Time-Lapse, the photographer whose life

blurred beyond the focused alchemic subtleties of black and white

unlike the lobbyist who remained uniformly shameless

or the statistician who was so neutral about

those he loved, he seemed no

more than average

so I left him for the substitute

teacher who set such a teaser of a quiz

I could not resist him, the choices so multiple

the possibilities for love were endless, or so I thought, exhausting

his pre-scored answers far too quickly

unwrapping the Eskimo

sandwich

the DICKIE DEE

ice cream kid sold me after

he quit my bed and dressed, he too was looking

for a father figure, someone to sleep with who makes him

feel safe

another literary man like me but perhaps one

more famous, who might read The Odyssey aloud to him in bed

before lights out, only to let us undock from our aimless, common moorings

I am the homeless man, hypocrite lecteur

you long to take in

who owns no baggage to pack yours into

who always needs a shower, my shoulders especially broad and dirty

with a back it takes hours to wash, who will slip on your sweaty CALVIN KLEINS

afterwards, if you want, and then let you peel them off, who will stay

for another night or another lifetime even if you don’t

ask nicely, men are so

fidèle

je me souviens, I am

the one you recognize

from the bar who looks nervously away, the one

you confront when shaving, the peculiarities of your face hard

to summarize in the clipped, forever-young vocabulary of the companion ads, you are

the man in chinos at the street corner with a broken umbrella

your wet BROOK BROTHERS shirt unbuttoned

at the neck, whom I

hesitate to give

directions, whose reflection

is trampled by the rainy afternoon

crowds of a city where no one ever truly lives.

II

IDEOGRAMS

This Cabinet

locks from the inside

its key on twine looped

round my neck

cold jagged teeth burning

into pale skin.

It is pre-dawn.

Shadows

the trees cast over pink and fading

snow are antlers

about to be shed, elk

stooping to

drink from the thawing lake.

Ice porous as lace

edges the mossy shore, cracks

to the touch, melts

on my tongue, sluice heady

with spruce and as cold

as pickerel, weak late

winter sun at last

burning

a keyhole through low

thinning cloud.

Caught in the Updraft

A kite is the last poem you have written...
                               —Leonard Cohen

What do you say about a boy who flies

his sister’s shoes at the end of a kite

vaulting above an empty field, leaving her

stranded on a patch of grass nosing through

thin sheets of runoff, too many wavelets

fracturing a mirror of scattering, scudding

cumulus for her to stop

kissing her boyfriend, the wind keeping her kid

brother busy—where it comes from no

one can guess, the gusts this March warm and inspired

fast as a gazelle across some distant plain he starts

hunting as he leans back in shirtsleeves, the kite

ruddered by shoes open-toed and strung up

higher than he could have hoped for, the jubilant

tail of the kite almost valedictory, so tiny everything

seems now, his sister and her boyfriend lost

to him on their eyelet of grass turning

green and tender early in the season

snow-melt enticing silt from the mountains

all around them, both unconcerned whole geologic

ages could pass in an hour, the water isolating

them in the field already quick with micro

organisms still no more than ideas

wriggly with possibilities so limitless

his knees unlock against their pull, the far-off

glaciers a constant glimpsed as if

through dawn curtains upon waking, love

a variable he will have a hard time

believing can be proved, the tug on

the line beyond reason, any word almost

lifting him off his feet, the impurity

of its drive anarchic, spontaneous, a fast one

he will spend unutterable lifetimes failing

to control, his sister’s shoes an anchor

the wind is there for, so many

kites in his head to sweet-talk into the sky

his hands becoming rope-burned

and cagey, he can’t see himself

wanting anyone’s

help?

The Piano

It was something you would never let me play, the unseen body

of its music never to be drawn out by my fingers, its keys still

tantalizing, just beyond reach, sheet music ready on a stand, time

signature dark as the sheen of its hinged lid, a rich and luminous

eggplant dozing past twilight in a garden you’ve kept to yourself

this upright locked in the study, its shape reserved for your touch

feet working the pedals, a pilot snug in the cockpit of your Phantom

—you fathered me after the war—such a nightfighter high above

us all, high above our dreaming suburb, speed and ascent scored

across the clouds’ wind-shred staff—what bruises, what passion

leafing out, vines climbing into indigo skies, the unpicked glories

of your music open, camouflaged by the bass notes of its engines.

Ideogram, in the Half-Light

You are sleeping, the alarm yet to rouse you, and I am

afraid it will disturb us with its aimless news, your body

turning away from me, shoulders curved against the sweet

half-light of darkness in the first room we share, early sun

sliding through thin hotel curtains across our bed, traffic

rising, warm air lifting from the drowsy city floors below

—dreaming: shock of the elevator shaft, of storey collapsing

into story, you and I; who am I, talking in your sleep, you begin

to tell me, words wearing down in the radiance of descending

inwards—psyche—beyond the radio alarm, the news I cannot

turn off, digital time altering place, integers cutting through

whatever quiet you may well harbour, my fingers settling

on your lips, analogue and anodyne, keys to an unspoken-for

country, feathers from my pillow your involuntary breaths

might blow off, patient dreamer sleeping through the fearful

the courage to love, the blades of your shoulders parentheses

against my chest while the zero news, the alarm, outdistance

this drifting, unwritten hour—sweet man, when my time

has come and the elevator doors stutter somewhere open

wake me gently: you are sleeping, you are my sleeping form.

Free Associations

i

I write “Charleswood.”

You rewrite “Small trees.”

I think “Vacancy.”

Untouched land.

Caragana.

Yellow bits of news

print crumpling among

bushes in a vestigial

lot.

Blind

Man’s Bluff.

Such shady trees.

Nose Hill bald

with dusk overshadowing

games of tag. The pause.

Five years old.

Crepuscular prairie

remnant impinged upon

by suburbs, the last

crocus and dirt

under a man’s fingernails

while another

house goes

up, small

trees bull

dozed, the cut and lashed

boughs, my green

scavenged bones hung in

side a tent of uninflated

skin—temporary

shelter (something felt if

untouched) sagging

with dry

short-grass light.

ii

I cross out “Grass.”

You re-enter “Small trees.”