Circle Game

by Margaret Atwood

  the centres

  travel with us unseen

  like our shadows

  on a day when there is no sun.

  We must move back:

  there are too many foregrounds.

  Now, clutter of twigs

  across our eyes, tatter

  of birds at the eye’s edge; the straggle

  of dead treetrunks; patch

  of lichen

  and in love, tangle

  of limbs and fingers, the texture

  of pores and lines on the skin.

  vii

  An other sense tugs at us:

  we have lost something,

  some key to these things

  which must be writings

  and are locked against us

  or perhaps (like a potential

  mine, unknown vein

  of metal in the rock)

  something not lost or hidden

  but just not found yet

  that informs, holds together

  this confusion, this largeness

  and dissolving:

  not above or behind

  or within it, but one

  with it: an

  identity:

  something too huge and simple

  for us to see.

  The Explorers

  The explorers will come

  in several minutes

  and find this island.

  (It is a stunted island,

  rocky, with room

  for only a few trees, a thin

  layer of soil; hardly

  bigger than a bed.

  That is how

  they’ve missed it

  until now)

  Already their boats draw near,

  their flags flutter,

  their oars push at the water.

  They will be jubilant

  and shout, at finding

  that there was something

  they had not found before,

  although this island will afford

  not much more than a foothold:

  little to explore;

  but they will be surprised

  (we can’t see them yet;

  we know they must be

  coming, because they always come

  several minutes too late)

  (they won’t be able

  to tell how long

  we were cast away, or why,

  or, from these

  gnawed bones,

  which was the survivor)

  at the two skeletons

  The Settlers

  A second after

  the first boat touched the shore,

  there was a quick skirmish

  brief as a twinge

  and then the land was settled

  (of course there was really

  no shore: the water turned

  to land by having

  objects in it: caught and kept

  from surge, made

  less than immense

  by networks of

  roads and grids of fences)

  and as for us, who drifted

  picked by the sharks

  during so many bluegreen

  centuries before they came:

  they found us

  inland, stranded

  on a ridge of bedrock,

  defining our own island.

  From our inarticulate

  skeleton (so

  intermixed, one

  carcass),

  they postulated wolves.

  They dug us down

  into the solid granite

  where our bones grew flesh again,

  came up trees and

  grass.

  Still

  we are the salt

  seas that uphold these lands.

  Now horses graze

  inside this fence of ribs, and

  children run, with green

  smiles, (not knowing

  where) across

  the fields of our open hands.