Circle Game

by Margaret Atwood

(we thought)

  we have begun to unpack.

  A residual brass bedstead

  scratched with the initials

  of generic brides and grooms;

  chipped squat teapots: old totemic

  mothers; a boxful

  of used hats.

  In the forest, even

  apart from the trodden

  paths, we can tell (from the sawn

  firstumps) that many

  have passed the same way

  some time before

  this (hieroglyphics

  carved in the bark)

  Things here grow from the ground

  too insistently

  green to seem

  spontaneous. (My skeletons, I think,

  will be still

  in the windows when I look,

  as well as the books

  and the index-

  fingered gloves.)

  There is also a sea

  that refuses to stay in the harbour:

  becomes opaque

  air or throws

  brown seaweeds like small drowned hands

  up on these shores

  (the fishermen

  are casting their nets here

  as well)

  and blunted mountains

  rolling

  (the first whales maybe?)

  in the

  inescapable mists.

  Journey to the Interior

  There are similarities

  I notice: that the hills

  which the eyes make flat as a wall, welded

  together, open as I move

  to let me through; become

  endless as prairies; that the trees

  grow spindly, have their roots

  often in swamps; that this is a poor country;

  that a cliff is not known

  as rough except by hand, and is

  therefore inaccessible. Mostly

  that travel is not the easy going

  from point to point, a dotted

  line on a map, location

  plotted on a square surface

  but that I move surrounded by a tangle

  of branches, a net of air and alternate

  light and dark, at all times;

  that there are no destinations

  apart from this.

  There are differences

  of course: the lack of reliable charts;

  more important, the distraction of small details:

  your shoe among the brambles under the chair

  where it shouldn’t be; lucent

  white mushrooms and a paring knife

  on the kitchen table; a sentence

  crossing my path, sodden as a fallen log

  I’m sure I passed yesterday

  (have I been

  walking in circles again?)

  but mostly the danger:

  many have been here, but only

  some have returned safely.

  A compass is useless; also

  trying to take directions

  from the movements of the sun,

  which are erratic;

  and words here are as pointless

  as calling in a vacant

  wilderness.

  Whatever I do I must

  keep my head. I know

  it is easier for me to lose my way

  forever here, than in other landscapes

  Some Objects of Wood and Stone

  i) Totems

  We went to the park

  where they kept the wooden people:

  static, multiple

  uprooted and trans-

  planted.

  Their faces were restored,

  freshly-painted.

  In front of them

  the other wooden people

  posed for each others’ cameras

  and nearby a new booth

  sold replicas and souvenirs.

  One of the people was real.

  It lay on its back, smashed

  by a toppling fall or just

  the enduring of minor winters.

  Only one of the heads had

  survived intact, and it was

  also beginning to decay

  but there was a

  life in the progressing

  of old wood back to

  the earth, obliteration

  that the clear-hewn

  standing figures lacked.

  As for us, perennial watchers,

  tourists of another kind

  there is nothing for us to worship;

  no pictures of ourselves, no bluesky

  summer fetishes, no postcards

  we can either buy, or

  smiling

  be.

  There are few totems that remain

  living for us.

  Though in passing,

  through glass we notice

  dead trees in the seared meadows

  dead roots bleaching in the swamps.

  ii) Pebbles

  Talking was difficult. Instead

  we gathered coloured pebbles

  from the places on the beach

  where they occurred.

  They were sea-smoothed, sea-completed.

  They enclosed what they intended

  to mean in shapes

  as random and necessary

  as the shapes of words

  and when finally

  we spoke

  the sounds of our voices fell

  into the air single and

  solid and rounded and really

  there

  and then dulled, and then like sounds

  gone, a fistful of gathered

  pebbles there was no point

  in taking home, dropped on a beachful

  of other coloured pebbles

  and when we turned to go

  a flock of small

  birds flew scattered by the

  fright of our sudden moving

  and disappeared: hard

  sea pebbles

  thrown solid for an instant

  against the sky

  flight of words

  iii) Carved Animals

  The small carved

  animal is passed from

  hand to hand

  around the circle

  until the stone grows warm

  touching, the hands do not know

  the form of animal

  which was made or

  the true form of stone

  uncovered

  and the hands, the fingers the

  hidden small bones

  of the hands bend to hold the shape,

  shape themselves, grow

  cold with the stone’s cold, grow

  also animal, exchange

  until the skin wonders

  if stone is human

  In the darkness later

  and even when the animal

  has gone, they keep

  the image of that

  inner shape

  hands holding warm

  hands holding

  the half-formed air

  Pre-Amphibian

  Again so I subside

  nudged by the softening

  driftwood of your body

  tangle on you like a water-

  weed caught

  on a submerged treelimb

  with sleep like a swamp

  growing, closing around me

  sending its tendrils through the brown

  sediments of darkness

  where we transmuted are

  part of this warm rotting

  of vegetable flesh

  this quiet spawning of roots

  released

  from the lucidities of day

  when you are something I can

  trace a line around, with eyes

  cut shapes

  from air, the element

  where we

  must calculate according to

  solidities

  but here I blur

&nb
sp; into you our breathing sinking

  to green millenniums

  and sluggish in our blood

  all ancestors

  are warm fish moving

  The earth

  shifts, bringing

  the moment before focus, when

  these tides recede; and we

  see each other through the

  hardening scales of waking

  stranded, astounded

  in a drying world

  we flounder, the air

  ungainly in our new lungs

  with sunlight steaming merciless on the shores of morning

  Against Still Life

  Orange in the middle of a table:

  It isn’t enough

  to walk around it

  at a distance, saying

  it’s an orange:

  nothing to do

  with us, nothing

  else: leave it alone

  I want to pick it up

  in my hand

  I want to peel the

  skin off; I want

  more to be said to me

  than just Orange:

  want to be told

  everything it has to say

  And you, sitting across

  the table, at a distance, with

  your smile contained, and like the orange

  in the sun: silent:

  Your silence

  isn’t enough for me

  now, no matter with what

  contentment you fold

  your hands together; I want

  anything you can say

  in the sunlight:

  stories of your various

  childhoods, aimless journeyings,

  your loves; your articulate

  skeleton; your posturings; your lies.

  These orange silences

  (sunlight and hidden smile)

  make me want to

  wrench you into saying;

  now I’d crack your skull

  like a walnut, split it like a pumpkin

  to make you talk, or get

  a look inside

  But quietly:

  if I take the orange

  with care enough and hold it

  gently

  I may find

  an egg

  a sun

  an orange moon

  perhaps a skull; centre

  of all energy

  resting in my hand

  can change it to

  whatever I desire

  it to be

  and you, man, orange afternoon

  lover, wherever

  you sit across from me

  (tables, trains, buses)

  if I watch

  quietly enough

  and long enough

  at last, you will say

  (maybe without speaking)

  (there are mountains

  inside your skull

  garden and chaos, ocean

  and hurricane; certain

  corners of rooms, portraits

  of great-grandmothers, curtains

  of a particular shade;

  your deserts; your private

  dinosaurs; the first

  woman)

  all I need to know:

  tell me

  everything

  just as it was

  from the beginning.

  The Islands

  There are two of them:

  One larger, with steep granite

  cliffs facing us, dropping sheer

  to the deep lake;

  the other smaller, closer

  to land, with a reef running

  out from it and dead trees

  grey, waist-high in the water.

  We know they are alone

  and always will be.

  The lake takes care of that

  and if it went,

  they would be hills

  and still demand

  separateness

  from the eye.

  Yet, standing on the cliff

  (the two

  of us)

  on our bigger island,

  looking,

  we find it pleasing

  (it soothes our instinct for

  symmetry, proportion,

  for company perhaps)

  that there are two of them.

  Letters, Towards and Away

  i

  It is not available to us

  it

  is not available, I said

  closing my hours against you.

  I live in a universe

  mostly paper.

  I make tents

  from cancelled stamps.

  Letters

  are permitted but

  don’t touch me, I’d

  crumple

  I said

  everything depends on you

  staying away.

  ii

  I didn’t want you to be

  visible.

  How could you invade

  me when

  I ordered you not

  to

  Leave my evasions

  alone

  stay in the borders

  I’ve drawn, I wrote, but

  you twisted your own wide spaces

  and made them include me.

  iii

  You came easily into my house

  and without being asked

  washed the dirty dishes,

  because you don’t find

  my forms of chaos,

  inverted midnights

  and crusted plates,

  congenial:

  restoring some kind of

  daily normal order.

  Not normal for me:

  I live in a house where

  beautiful clean dishes

  aren’t important

  enough.

  iv

  Love is an awkward word

  Not what I mean and

  too much like magazine stories

  in stilted dentists’

  waiting rooms.

  How can anyone use it?

  I’d rather say

  I like your

  lean spine

  or your eyebrows

  or your shoes

  but just by standing there and

  being awkward

  you force me to speak

  love.

  v

  You collapse my house of cards

  merely by breathing

  making other places

  with your hands on wood, your

  feet on sand

  creating with such

  generosity, mountains, distances

  empty beach and rocks and sunlight

  as you walk

  so calmly into the sea

  and returning, you

  taste of salt,

  and put together my own

  body, another

  place

  for me to live

  in.

  vi

  I don’t wear gratitude

  well. Or hats.

  What would I do with

  veils and silly feathers

  or a cloth rose

  growing from the top of my head?

  What should I do with this

  peculiar furred emotion?

  vii

  What you invented

  what you

  destroyed

  with your transient hands

  you did so gently

  I didn’t notice at the time

  but where is all that wall-

  paper?

  Now

  I’m roofless:

  the sky

  you built for me is too

  open.

  Quickly,

  send me some more letters.

  A Place: Fragments

  i

  Here on the rim, cringing

  under the cracked whip of winter

  we live

  in houses of ice,

  but not because we want to:


  in order to survive

  we make what we can and have to

  with what we have.

  ii

  Old woman I visited once

  out of my way

  in a little-visited province:

  she had a neat

  house, a clean parlour

  though obsolete and poor:

  a cushion with a fringe;

  glass animals arranged

  across the mantlepiece (a swan, a horse,

  a bull); a mirror;

  a teacup sent from Scotland;

  several heraldic spoons;

  a lamp; and in the centre

  of the table, a paperweight:

  hollow glass globe

  filled with water, and

  a house, a man, a snowstorm.

  The room was as

  dustless as possible

  and free of spiders.

  I

  stood in the door-

  way, at the fulcrum where

  this trivial but

  stringent inner order

  held its delicate balance

  with the random scattering or

  clogged merging of

  things: ditch by the road; dried

  reeds in the wind; flat

  wet bush, grey sky

  sweeping away outside.

  iii

  The cities are only outposts.

  Watch that man

  walking on cement as though on snowshoes:

  senses the road

  a muskeg, loose mat of roots and brown

  vegetable decay

  or crust of ice that

  easily might break and

  slush or water under

  suck him down

  The land flows like a

  sluggish current.

  The mountains eddy slowly towards the sea.

  iv

  The people who come here also

  flow: their bodies becoming

  nebulous, diffused, quietly

  spreading out into the air across

  these interstellar sidewalks

  v

  This is what it must be

  like in outer space

  where the stars are pasted flat

  against the total

  black of the expanding

  eye, fly-

  specks of burning dust

  vi

  There is no centre;