Selected Poems II (1976-1986)

by Margaret Atwood

  Just this: I think of the woman

  they did not kill.

  Instead they sewed her face

  shut, closed her mouth

  to a hole the size of a straw,

  and put her back on the streets,

  a mute symbol.

  It doesn't matter where

  this was done or why or whether

  by one side or the other;

  such things are done as soon

  as there are sides

  and I don't know if good men

  living crisp lives exist

  because of this woman or in spite

  of her.

  But power

  like this is not abstract, it's not concerned

  with politics and free will, it's beyond slogans

  and as for passion, this

  is its intricate denial,

  the knife that cuts lovers

  out of your flesh like tumors,

  leaving you breastless

  and without a name,

  flattened, bloodless, even your voice

  cauterized by too much pain,

  a flayed body untangled

  string by string and hung

  to the wall, an agonized banner

  displayed for the same reason

  flags are.

  A Women's Issue

  The woman in the spiked device

  that locks around the waist and between

  the legs, with holes in it like a tea strainer

  is Exhibit A.

  The woman in black with a net window

  to see through and a four-inch

  wooden peg jammed up

  between her legs so she can't be raped

  is Exhibit B.

  Exhibit C is the young girl

  dragged into the bush by the midwives

  and made to sing while they scrape the flesh

  from between her legs, then tie her thighs

  till she scabs over and is called healed.

  Now she can be married.

  For each childbirth they'll cut her

  open, then sew her up.

  Men like tight women.

  The ones that die are carefully buried.

  The next exhibit lies flat on her back

  while eighty men a night

  move through her, ten an hour.

  She looks at the ceiling, listens

  to the door open and close.

  A bell keeps ringing.

  Nobody knows how she got here.

  You'll notice that what they have in common

  is between the legs. Is this

  why wars are fought?

  Enemy territory, no man's

  land, to be entered furtively,

  fenced, owned but never surely,

  scene of these desperate forays

  at midnight, captures

  and sticky murders, doctors' rubber gloves

  greasy with blood, flesh made inert, the surge

  of your own uneasy power.

  This is no museum.

  Who invented the word love?

  Christmas Carols

  Children do not always mean

  hope. To some they mean despair.

  This woman with her hair cut off

  so she could not hang herself

  threw herself from a rooftop, thirty

  times raped & pregnant by the enemy

  who did this to her. This one had her pelvis

  broken by hammers so the child

  could be extracted. Then she was thrown away,

  useless, a ripped sack. This one

  punctured herself with kitchen skewers

  and bled to death on a greasy

  oilcloth table, rather than bear

  again and past the limit. There

  is a limit, though who knows

  when it may come? Nineteenth-century

  ditches are littered with small wax corpses

  dropped there in terror. A plane

  swoops too low over the fox farm

  and the mother eats her young. This too

  is Nature. Think twice then

  before you worship turned furrows, or pay

  lip service to some full belly

  or other, or single out one girl to play

  the magic mother, in blue

  & white, up on that pedestal,

  perfect & intact, distinct

  from those who aren't. Which means

  everyone else. It's a matter

  of food & available blood. If mother-

  hood is sacred, put

  your money where your mouth is. Only

  then can you expect the coming

  down to the wrecked & shimmering earth

  of that miracle you sing

  about, the day

  when every child is a holy birth.

  Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written

  (For Carolyn Forché)

  i

  This is the place

  you would rather not know about,

  this is the place that will inhabit you,

  this is the place you cannot imagine,

  this is the place that will finally defeat you

  where the word why shrivels and empties

  itself. This is famine.

  ii

  There is no poem you can write

  about it, the sandpits

  where so many were buried

  & unearthed, the unendurable

  pain still traced on their skins.

  This did not happen last year

  or forty years ago but last week.

  This has been happening,

  this happens.

  We make wreaths of adjectives for them,

  we count them like beads,

  we turn them into statistics & litanies

  and into poems like this one.

  Nothing works.

  They remain what they are.

  iii

  The woman lies on the wet cement floor

  under the unending light,

  needle marks on her arms put there

  to kill the brain

  and wonders why she is dying.

  She is dying because she said.

  She is dying for the sake of the word.

  It is her body, silent

  and fingerless, writing this poem.

  iv

  It resembles an operation

  but it is not one

  nor despite the spread legs, grunts

  & blood, is it a birth.

  Partly it's a job,

  partly it's a display of skill

  like a concerto.

  It can be done badly

  or well, they tell themselves.

  Partly it's an art.

  v

  The facts of this world seen clearly

  are seen through tears;

  why tell me then

  there is something wrong with my eyes?

  To see clearly and without flinching,

  without turning away,

  this is agony, the eyes taped open

  two inches from the sun.

  What is it you see then?

  Is it a bad dream, a hallucination?

  Is it a vision?

  What is it you hear?

  The razor across the eyeball

  is a detail from an old film.

  It is also a truth.

  Witness is what you must bear.

  vi

  In this country you can say what you like

  because no one will listen to you anyway,

  it's safe enough, in this country you can try to write

  the poem that can never be written,

  the poem that invents

  nothing and excuses nothing,

  because you invent and excuse yourself each day.

  Elsewhere, this poem is not invention.

  Elsewhere, this poem takes courage.

  Elsewhere, this poem must be written

  because the poets are
already dead.

  Elsewhere, this poem must be written

  as if you are already dead,

  as if nothing more can be done

  or said to save you.

  Elsewhere you must write this poem

  because there is nothing more to do.

  ***

  Vultures

  Hung there in the thermal

  whiteout of noon, dark ash

  in the chimney's updraft, turning

  slowly like a thumb pressed down

  on target; indolent V's; flies, until they drop.

  Then they're hyenas, raucous

  around the kill, flapping their black

  umbrellas, the feathered red-eyed widows

  whose pot bodies violate mourning,

  the snigger at funerals,

  the burp at the wake.

  They cluster, like beetles

  laying their eggs on carrion,

  gluttonous for a space, a little

  territory of murder: food

  and children.

  Frowzy old saint, bald-

  headed and musty, scrawny-

  necked recluse on your pillar

  of blazing air which is not

  heaven: what do you make

  of death, which you do not

  cause, which you eat daily?

  I make life, which is a prayer.

  I make clean bones.

  I make a gray zinc noise

  which to me is a song.

  Well, heart, out of all this

  carnage, could you do better?

  Sunset II

  Sunset, now that we're finally in it

  is not what we thought.

  Did you expect this violet black

  soft edge to outer space, fragile as blown ash

  and shuddering like oil, or the reddish

  orange that flows into

  your lungs and through your fingers?

  The waves smooth mouthpink light

  over your eyes, fold after fold.

  This is the sun you breathe in,

  pale blue. Did you

  expect it to be this warm?

  One more goodbye,

  sentimental as they all are.

  The far west recedes from us

  like a mauve postcard of itself

  and dissolves into the sea.

  Now there's a moon,

  an irony. We walk

  north towards no home,

  joined at the hand.

  I'll love you forever,

  I can't stop time.

  This is you on my skin somewhere

  in the form of sand.

  Variation on the Word Sleep

  I would like to watch you sleeping,

  which may not happen.

  I would like to watch you,

  sleeping. I would like to sleep

  with you, to enter

  your sleep as its smooth dark wave

  slides over my head

  and walk with you through that lucent

  wavering forest of bluegreen leaves

  with its watery sun & three moons

  towards the cave where you must descend,

  towards your worst fear

  I would like to give you the silver

  branch, the small white flower, the one

  word that will protect you

  from the grief at the center

  of your dream, from the grief

  at the center. I would like to follow

  you up the long stairway

  again & become

  the boat that would row you back

  carefully, a flame

  in two cupped hands

  to where your body lies

  beside me, and you enter

  it as easily as breathing in

  I would like to be the air

  that inhabits you for a moment

  only. I would like to be that unnoticed

  & that necessary.

  Mushrooms

  i

  In this moist season,

  mist on the lake and thunder

  afternoons in the distance

  they ooze up through the earth

  during the night,

  like bubbles, like tiny

  bright red balloons

  filling with water;

  a sound below sound, the thumbs of rubber

  gloves turned softly inside out.

  In the mornings, there is the leaf mold

  starred with nipples,

  with cool white fishgills,

  leathery purple brains,

  fist-sized suns dulled to the color of embers,

  poisonous moons, pale yellow.

  ii

  Where do they come from?

  For each thunderstorm that travels

  overhead there's another storm

  that moves parallel in the ground.

  Struck lightning is where they meet.

  Underfoot there's a cloud of rootlets,

  shed hairs or a bundle of loose threads

  blown slowly through the midsoil.

  These are their flowers, these fingers

  reaching through darkness to the sky,

  these eyeblinks

  that burst and powder the air with spores,

  iii

  They feed in shade, on halfleaves

  as they return to water,

  on slowly melting logs,

  deadwood. They glow

  in the dark sometimes. They taste

  of rotten meat or cloves

  or cooking steak or bruised

  lips or new snow.

  iv

  It isn't only

  for food I hunt them

  but for the hunt and because

  they smell of death and the waxy

  skins of the newborn,

  flesh into earth into flesh.

  Here is the handful

  of shadow I have brought back to you:

  this decay, this hope, this mouth-

  ful of dirt, this poetry.

  Out

  This is all you go with,

  not much, a plastic bag

  with a zipper, a bar of soap,

  a command, blood in the sink,

  the body's word.

  You spiral out there,

  locked & single

  and on your way at last,

  the rings of Saturn brilliant

  as pain, your dark craft

  nosing its way through stars.

  You've been gone now

  how many years?

  Hot metal hurtles over your eyes,

  razors the flesh, recedes;

  this is the universe

  too, this burnt view.

  Deepfreeze in blankets; tubes feed you,

  your hurt cells glow & tick;

  when the time comes you will wake

  naked and mended, on earth again, to find

  the rest of us changed and older.

  Meanwhile your body

  hums you to sleep, you cruise

  among the nebulae, ice glass

  on the bedside table,

  the shining pitcher, your white cloth feet

  which blaze with reflected light

  against the harsh black shadow

  behind the door.

  Hush, say the hands

  of the nurses, drawing the blinds

  down hush

  says your drifting blood,

  cool stardust.

  Blue Dwarfs

  Tree burial, you tell me, that's

  the way. Not up in but under.

  Rootlets & insects, you say as we careen

  along the highway with the news on

  through a wind thickening with hayfever.

  Last time it was fire.

  It's a problem, what to do

  with yourself after you're dead.

  Then there's before.

  The scabby wild plums fall from the tree

  as I climb it, branches & leaves


  peeling off under my bootsoles.

  They vanish into the bone-colored

  grass & mauve asters

  or lie among the rocks and the stench

  of woodchucks, bursting & puckered

  and oozing juice & sweet pits & yellow

  pulp but still

  burning, cool and blue

  as the cores of the old stars

  that shrivel out there in multiples

  of zero. Pinpoint mouths

  burrowing in them. I pick up the good ones

  which won't last long either.

  If there's a tree for you it should be

  this one. Here

  it is, your six-quart basket

  of blue light, sticky

  and fading but more than

  still edible. Time smears

  our hands all right, we lick it off, a windfall.

  Last Day

  This is the last day of the last week.

  It's June, the evenings touching

  our skins like plush, milkweed sweetening