Selected Poems

Margaret Atwood

Title Page

Contents

From THE CIRCLE GAME (1966)

This is a photograph of me

After the flood, we

The city planners

Eventual Proteus

The circle game

Migration: C.P.R.

Journey to the interior

Some objects of wood and stone

Pre-amphibian

Against still life

A place: fragments

The explorers

The settlers

From THE ANIMALS IN THAT COUNTRY (1968)

The animals in that country

A foundling

The landlady

A fortification

At the tourist centre in Boston

Elegy for the giant tortoises

Roominghouse, winter

It is dangerous to read newspapers

Progressive insanities of a pioneer

Speeches for Dr Frankenstein

Backdrop addresses cowboy

I was reading a scientific article

More and more

A voice

The reincarnation of Captain Cook

Axiom

THE JOURNALS OF SUSANNA MOODIE (1970)

JOURNAL I 1832–1840

Disembarking at Quebec

Further arrivals

First neighbours

The planters

The wereman

Paths and thingscape

The two fires

Looking in a mirror

Departure from the bush

JOURNAL II 1840–1871

Death of a young son by drowning

The immigrants

Dream 1: the bush garden

1837 war in retrospect

Dream 2: Brian the still-hunter

Charivari

Dream 3: night bear which frightened cattle

The deaths of the other children

The double voice

JOURNAL III 1871–1969

Later in Belleville: career

Daguerreotype taken in old age

Wish: metamorphosis to heraldic emblem

Visit to Toronto, with companions

Solipsism while dying

Thoughts from underground

Alternate thoughts from underground

Resurrection

A bus along St Clair: December

From PROCEDURES FOR UNDERGROUND (1970)

Game after supper

Girl and horse, 1928

The small cabin

Midwinter, presolstice

Procedures for underground

Dreams of the animals

Cyclops

Three desk objects

Projected slide of an unknown soldier

Comic books vs. history (1949, 1969)

Highest altitude

A morning

A soul, geologically

Habitation

Woman skating

Younger sister, going swimming

Fishing for eel totems

Buffalo in compound: Alberta

Carrying food home in winter

From POWER POLITICS (1971)

You take my hand

She considers evading him

They eat out

After the agony

My beautiful wooden leader

You want to go back

Their attitudes differ

After all

Yes at first

We are hard

At first I was given

You refuse to own

We hear nothing

You did it

This is a mistake

Beyond truth

They are hostile nations

Spring again

I am sitting

I see you

What is it

You are the sun

Hesitations outside the door

Lying here

I look up

I can’t tell you

They were all inaccurate

From YOU ARE HAPPY (1974)

Newsreel: man and firing squad

November

Digging

Tricks with mirrors

You are happy

SONGS OF THE TRANSFORMED

Pig son

Bull song

Rat song

Crow song

Song of the worms

Owl song

Siren song

Song of the fox

Song of the hen’s head

Corpse song

CIRCE/MUD POEMS

Is/not

Eating fire

Four auguries

Head against white

There is only one of everything

Late August

Book of ancestors

About the Author

Connect with HMH

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

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 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.

But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being even, the roofs all display
the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,
certain things:
the smell of spilled oil a faint

sickness lingering in the garages,
a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,
a plastic hose poised in a vicious
coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give momentary access to
the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsized, will slide
obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices.

That is where the City Planners
with the insane faces of political conspirators
are scattered over unsurveyed
territories, concealed from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;

guessing directions, they sketch
transitory lines rigid as wooden borders
on a wall in the white vanishing air

tracing the panic of suburb
order in a bland madness of snows.

Eventual Proteus

I held you
through all your shifts
of structure: while your bones turned
from caved rock back to marrow,
the dangerous
fur faded to hair
the bird’s cry died in your throat
the treebark paled from your skin
the leaves from your eyes

till you limped back again
to daily man:
a lounger on streetcorners
in iron-shiny gabardine
a leaner on stale tables;
at night a twitching sleeper
dreaming of crumbs and rinds and a sagging woman
caged by a sour bed.

The early
languages are obsolete.

These days we keep
our weary distances:
sparring in the vacant spaces
of peeling rooms
and rented minutes, climbing
all the expected stairs, our voices
abraded with fatigue,
our bodies wary.

Shrunk by my disbelief
you cannot raise
the green gigantic skies, resume
the legends of your disguises:
this shape is final.

Now, when you come near
attempting towards me across
these sheer cavernous
inches of air

your flesh has no more stories
or surprises;

my face flinches
under the sarcastic
tongues of your estranging
fingers,
the caustic remark of your kiss.

The circle game

i

The children on the lawn
joined hand to hand
go round and round

each arm going into
the next arm, around
full circle
until it comes
back into each of the single
bodies again

They are singing, but
not to each other:
their feet move
almost in time to the singing

We can see
the concentration on
their faces, their eyes
fixed on the empty
moving spaces just in
front of them.

We might mistake this
tranced moving for joy
but there is no joy in it

We can see (arm in arm)
as we watch them go
round and round
intent, almost
studious (the grass
underfoot ignored, the trees
circling the lawn
ignored, the lake ignored)
that the whole point
for them
of going round and round
is (faster
slower)
going round and round

ii

Being with you
here, in this room

is like groping through a mirror
whose glass has melted
to the consistency
of gelatin

You refuse to be
(and I)
an exact reflection, yet
will not walk from the glass,
be separate.

Anyway, it is right
that they have put
so many mirrors here
(chipped, hung crooked)
in this room with its high transom
and empty wardrobe; even
the back of the door
has one.

There are people in the next room
arguing, opening and closing drawers
(the walls are thin)

You look past me, listening
to them, perhaps, or
watching
your own reflection somewhere
behind my head,
over my shoulder

You shift, and the bed
sags under us, losing its focus

there is someone in the next room

there is always

(your face
remote, listening)

someone in the next room.

iii

However,
in all their games
there seems
to be some reason

however
abstract they
at first appear

When we read them legends
in the evening
of monstrous battles, and secret
betrayals in the forest
and brutal deaths,

they scarcely listened;
one yawned and fidgeted; another
chewed the wooden handle
of a hammer;
the youngest one examined
a slight cut on his toe,

and we wondered how
they could remain
completely without fear
or even interest
as the final sword slid through
the dying hero.

The next night
walking along the beach

we found the trenches
they had been making:
fortified with pointed sticks
driven into the sides
of their sand moats

and a lake-enclosed island
with no bridges:

a last attempt
(however
eroded by the water
in an hour)

to make
maybe, a refuge human
and secure from the reach

of whatever walks along
(sword hearted)
these night beaches.

iv

Returning to the room:
I notice how
all your word-
plays, calculated ploys
of the body, the witticisms
of touch, are now
attempts to keep me
at a certain distance
and (at length) avoid
admitting I am here

I watch you
watching my face
indifferently
yet with the same taut curiosity
with which you might regard
a suddenly discovered part
of your own body:
a wart perhaps,

and I remember that
you said
in childhood you were
a tracer of maps
(not making but) moving
a pen or a forefinger

over the courses of the rivers,
the different colours
that mark the rise of mountains;
a memorizer
of names (to hold
these places
in their proper places)

So now you trace me
like a country’s boundary
or a strange new wrinkle in
your own wellknown skin
and I am fixed, stuck
down on the outspread map
of this room, of your mind’s continent
(here and yet not here, like
the wardrobe and the mirrors
the voices through the wall
your body ignored on the bed),

transfixed
by your eyes’
cold blue thumbtacks

v

The children like the block
of grey stone that was once a fort
but now is a museum:

especially
they like the guns
and the armour brought from
other times and countries

and when they go home
their drawings will be full
for some days, of swords
archaic sunburst maces
broken spears
and vivid red explosions.

While they explore
the cannons
(they aren’t our children)

we walk outside along
the earthworks, noting
how they are crumbling
under the unceasing
attacks of feet and flower roots

The weapons
that were once outside
sharpening themselves on war
are now indoors
there, in the fortress,
fragile
in glass cases;

Why is it
(I’m thinking
of the careful moulding
round the stonework archways)
that in this time, such
elaborate defences keep
things that are no longer
(much)
worth defending?

vi

And you play the safe game
the orphan game

the ragged winter game
that says, I am alone

(hungry: I know you want me
to play it also)

the game of the waif who stands
at every picture window,

shivering, pinched nose pressed
against the glass, the snow
collecting on his neck,
watching the happy families

(a game of envy)

Yet he despises them: they are so
Victorian Christmas-card:
the cheap paper shows
under the pigments of
their cheerful fire-
places and satin-
ribboned suburban laughter
and they have their own forms
of parlour
games: father and mother
playing father and mother

He’s glad
to be left
out by himself
in the cold

(hugging himself)

When I tell you this,
you say (with a smile fake
as a tinsel icicle):

You do it too.

Which in some ways
is a lie, but also I suppose
is right, as usual:

although I tend to pose
in other seasons
outside other windows.

vii

Summer again;
in the mirrors of this room
the children wheel, singing
the same song;

This casual bed
scruffy as dry turf,
the counterpane
rumpled with small burrows, is
their grassy lawn

and these scuffed walls
contain their circling trees,
that low clogged sink
their lake

(a wasp comes,
drawn by the piece of sandwich
left on the nearby beach
(how carefully you do
such details);
one of the children flinches
but won’t let go)

You make them
turn and turn, according to
the closed rules of your games,
but there is no joy in it

and as we lie
arm in arm, neither
joined nor separate
(your observations change me
to a spineless woman in
a cage of bones, obsolete fort
pulled inside out),
our lips moving
almost in time to their singing,

listening to the opening
and closing of the drawers
in the next room

(of course there is always
danger but where
would you locate it)

(the children spin
a round cage of glass
from the warm air
with their thread-thin
insect voices)

and as we lie
here, caught
in the monotony of wandering
from room to room, shifting
the place of our defences,

I want to break
these bones, your prisoning rhythms
(winter,
summer)
all the glass cases,

erase all maps,
crack the protecting
eggshell of your turning
singing children:

I want the circle
broken.

Migration: C.P.R.

i

Escaping from allegories
in the misty east, where inherited events
barnacle on the mind; where every gloved handshake
might be a finger pointing; you can’t look
in store windows without seeing
reflections/ remnants of privateer
bones or methodist grandfathers with jaws
carved as wood pulpits warning
of the old evil; where not-quite-
forgotten histories
make the boards of lineal frame
farmhouses rotten

Selected Poems

Contents

From THE CIRCLE GAME (1966)

This is a photograph of me

After the flood, we

The city planners

Eventual Proteus

The circle game

i

ii

iii

iv

v

vi

vii

Migration: C.P.R.

i

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