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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, date
Selected poems, 1965–1975

I. Title
PR9199 3 A8A6 1987 811'.54 87-17946
ISBN 0-395-40422-3 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-395-40422-5

eISBN 978-0-544-14701-0
v2.0320

Published by arrangement with Simon & Schuster

Originally published in Canada by Oxford University Press

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following.

Poems from The Animals in That Country, by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 1968 by Oxford University Press (Canadian Branch) and poems from Procedures for Underground, by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 1970 by Oxford University Press (Canadian Branch) by permission of Little, Brown and Co. in association with the Atlantic Monthly Press

Poems from The Journals of Susanna Moodie, copyright © 1976 by Oxford University Press, by permission of Oxford University Press

Poems from You Are Happy by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 1974 by Margaret Atwood by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc

Poems from Power Politics by Margaret Atwood, copyright © 1971 by Margaret Atwood. Poems from The Circle Game, copyright © 1966 by Margaret Atwood. Reprinted by permission of the House of Anansi Press

From THE CIRCLE GAME (1966)

This is a photograph of me

It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
then, as you scan

it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)

After the flood, we

We must be the only ones
left, in the mist that has risen
everywhere as well
as in these woods

I walk across the bridge
towards the safety of high ground
(the tops of the trees are like islands)

gathering the sunken
bones of the drowned mothers
(hard and round in my hands)
while the white mist washes
around my legs like water;

fish must be swimming
down in the forest beneath us,
like birds, from tree to tree
and a mile away
the city, wide and silent,
is lying lost, far undersea.

You saunter beside me, talking
of the beauty of the morning,
not even knowing
that there has been a flood,

tossing small pebbles
at random over your shoulder
into the deep thick air,

not hearing the first stumbling
footsteps of the almost-born
coming (slowly) behind us,
not seeing
the almost-human
brutal faces forming
(slowly)
out of stone.

The city planners

Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.