Selected Poems II (1976-1986)

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Selected Poems II (1976-1986) Page 6

by Margaret Atwood


  the sticky air which pulses

  with moths, their powdery wings and velvet

  tongues. In the dusk, nighthawks and the fluting

  voices from the pond, its edges

  webbed with spawn. Everything

  leans into the pulpy moon.

  In the mornings the hens

  make egg after egg, warty-shelled

  and perfect; the henhouse floor

  packed with old shit and winter straw

  trembles with flies, green and silver.

  Who wants to leave it, who wants it

  to end, water moving

  against water, skin

  against skin? We wade

  through moist sun-

  light towards nothing, which is oval

  and full. This egg

  in my hand is our last meal,

  you break it open and the sky

  turns orange again and the sun rises

  again and this is the last day again.

  From INTERLUNAR (1984)

  From SNAKE POEMS

  Snake Woman

  I was once the snake woman,

  the only person, it seems, in the whole place

  who wasn't terrified of them.

  I used to hunt with two sticks

  among milkweed and under porches and logs

  for this vein of cool green metal

  which would run through my fingers like mercury

  or turn to a raw bracelet

  gripping my wrist:

  I could follow them by their odor,

  a sick smell, acid and glandular,

  part skunk, part inside

  of a torn stomach,

  the smell of their fear.

  Once caught, I'd carry them,

  limp and terrorized, into the dining room,

  something even men were afraid of.

  What fun I had!

  Put that thing in my bed and I'll kill you.

  Now, I don't know.

  Now I'd consider the snake.

  Bad Mouth

  There are no leaf-eating snakes.

  All are fanged and gorge on blood.

  Each one is a hunter's hunter,

  nothing more than an endless gullet

  pulling itself on over the still-alive prey

  like a sock gone ravenous, like an evil glove,

  like sheer greed, lithe and devious.

  Puff adder buried in hot sand

  or poisoning the toes of boots,

  for whom killing is easy and careless

  as war, as digestion,

  why should you be spared?

  And you, Constrictor constrictor,

  sinuous ribbon of true darkness,

  one long muscle with eyes and an anus,

  looping like thick tar out of the trees

  to squeeze the voice from anything edible,

  reducing it to scales and belly.

  And you, pit viper

  with your venomous pallid throat

  and teeth like syringes

  and your nasty radar

  homing in on the deep red shadow

  nothing else knows it casts...

  Shall I concede these deaths?

  Between us there is no fellow feeling,

  as witness: a snake cannot scream.

  Observe the alien

  chainmail skin, straight out

  of science fiction, pure

  shiver, pure Saturn.

  Those who can explain them

  can explain anything.

  Some say they're a snarled puzzle

  only gasoline and a match can untangle.

  Even their mating is barely sexual,

  a romance between two lengths

  of cyanide-colored string.

  Despite their live births and squirming nests

  it's hard to believe in snakes loving.

  Alone among the animals

  the snake does not sing.

  The reason for them is the same

  as the reason for stars, and not human.

  Eating Snake

  I too have taken the god into my mouth,

  chewed it up and tried not to choke on the bones.

  Rattlesnake it was, panfried

  and good too though a little oily.

  (Forget the phallic symbolism:

  two differences:

  snake tastes like chicken,

  and who ever credited the prick with wisdom?)

  All peoples are driven

  to the point of eating their gods

  after a time: it's the old greed

  for a plateful of outer space, that craving for darkness,

  the lust to feel what it does to you

  when your teeth meet in divinity, in the flesh,

  when you swallow it down

  and you can see with its own cold eyes,

  look out through murder.

  This is a lot of fuss to make about mere lunch:

  metaphysics with onions.

  The snake was not served with its tail in its mouth

  as would have been appropriate.

  Instead the cook nailed the skin to the wall,

  complete with rattles, and the head was mounted.

  It was only a snake after all.

  (Nevertheless, the authorities are agreed:

  God is round.)

  Metempsychosis

  Somebody's grandmother glides through the bracken,

  in widow's black and graceful

  and sharp as ever: see how her eyes glitter!

  Who were you when you were a snake?

  This one was a dancer who is now

  a green streamer waved by its own breeze

  and here's your blunt striped uncle, come back

  to bask under the wicker chairs

  on the porch and watch over you.

  Unfurling itself from its cast skin,

  the snake proclaims resurrection

  to all believers

  though some tire soon of being born

  over and over; for them there's the breath

  that shivers in the yellow grass,

  a papery finger, half of a noose, a summons

  to the dead river.

  Who's that in the cold cellar

  with the apples and the rats? Whose is

  that voice of a husk rasping in the wind?

  Your lost child whispering Mother,

  the one more child you never had,

  your child who wants back in.

  Psalm to Snake

  O snake, you are an argument

  for poetry:

  a shift among dry leaves

  when there is no wind,

  a thin line moving through

  that which is not

  time, creating time,

  a voice from the dead, oblique

  and silent. A movement

  from left to right,

  a vanishing. Prophet under a stone.

  I know you're there

  even when I can't see you

  I see the trail you make

  in the blank sand, in the morning

  I see the point

  of intersection, the whiplash

  across the eye. I see the kill.

  O long word, cold-blooded and perfect

  Quattrocento

  The snake enters your dreams through paintings:

  this one, of a formal garden

  in which there are always three:

  the thin man with the green-white skin

  that marks him vegetarian

  and the woman with a swayback and hard breasts

  that look stuck on

  and the snake, vertical and with a head

  that's face-colored and haired like a woman's.

  Everyone looks unhappy,

  even the few zoo animals, stippled with sun,

  even the angel who's like a slab

  of flaming laundry, hovering

  up there with his sword of fire,

  unable a
s yet to strike.

  There's no love here.

  Maybe it's the boredom.

  And that's no apple but a heart

  torn out of someone

  in this myth gone suddenly Aztec.

  This is the possibility of death

  the snake is offering:

  death upon death squeezed together,

  a blood snowball.

  To devour it is to fall out

  of the still unending noon

  to a hard ground with a straight horizon

  and you are no longer the

  idea of a body but a body,

  you slide down into your body as into hot mud.

  You feel the membranes of disease

  close over your head, and history

  occurs to you and space enfolds

  you in its armies, in its nights, and you

  must learn to see in darkness.

  Here you can praise the light,

  having so little of it:

  it's the death you carry in you

  red and captured, that makes the world

  shine for you

  as it never did before.

  This is how you learn prayer.

  Love is choosing, the snake said.

  The kingdom of God is within you

  because you ate it.

  After Heraclitus

  The snake is one name of God,

  my teacher said:

  All nature is a fire

  we burn in and are

  renewed, one skin

  shed and then another.

  To talk with the body

  is what the snake does, letter

  after letter formed on the grass,

  itself a tongue, looping its earthy hieroglyphs,

  the sunlight praising it

  as it shines there on the doorstep,

  a green light blessing your house.

  This is the voice

  you could pray to for the answers

  to your sickness:

  leave it a bowl of milk,

  watch it drink

  You do not pray, but go for the shovel,

  old blood on the blade

  But pick it up and you would hold

  the darkness that you fear

  turned flesh and embers,

  cool power coiling into your wrists

  and it would be in your hands

  where it always has been.

  This is the nameless one

  giving itself a name,

  one among many

  and your own name as well.

  You know this and still kill it.

  ***

  From INTERLUNAR

  Bedside

  You sit beside the bed

  in the extremis ward, holding your father's feet

  as you have not done since you were a child.

  You would hold his hands, but they are strapped down,

  emptied at last of power.

  He can see, possibly, the weave of the sheet

  that covers him from chest to ankles;

  he does not wish to.

  He has been opened. He is at the mercy.

  You hold his feet,

  not moving. You would like

  to drag him back. You remember

  how you have judged each other

  in silence, relentlessly.

  You listen intently, as if for a signal,

  to the undersea ping of the monitors,

  the waterlogged lungs breathed into by machines,

  the heart, wired for sound

  and running too quickly in the stuck body,

  the murderous body, the body

  itself stalled in a field of ice

  that spreads out endlessly under it,

  the snowdrifts tucked by the wind around

  the limbs and torso.

  Now he is walking

  somewhere you cannot follow,

  leaving no footprints.

  Already in this whiteness

  he casts no shadow.

  Precognition

  Living backwards means only

  I must suffer everything twice.

  Those picnics were already loss:

  with the dragonflies and the clear streams halfway.

  What good did it do me to know

  how far along you would come with me

  and when you would return?

  By yourself, to a life you call daily.

  You did not consider me a soul

  but a landscape, not even one

  I recognize as mine, but foreign

  and rich in curios:

  an egg of blue marble,

  a dried pod,

  a clay goddess you picked up at a stall

  somewhere among the dun and dust-green

  hills and the bronze-hot

  sun and the odd shadows,

  not knowing what would be protection,

  or even the need for it then.

  I wake in the early dawn and there is the roadway

  shattered, and the glass and blood,

  from an intersection that has happened

  already, though I can't say when.

  Simply that it will happen.

  What could I tell you now that would keep you

  safe or warn you?

  What good would it do?

  Live and be happy.

  I would rather cut myself loose

  from time, shave off my hair

  and stand at a crossroads

  with a wooden bowl, throwing

  myself on the dubious mercy

  of the present, which is innocent

  and forgetful and hits the eye bare

  and without words and without even

  than do this mourning over.

  Keep

  I know that you will die

  before I do.

  Already your skin tastes faintly

  of the acid that is eating through you.

  None of this, none of this is true,

  no more than a leaf is botany,

  along this avenue of old maples

  the birds fall down through the branches

  as the long slow rain of small bodies

  falls like snow through the darkening sea,

  wet things in turn move up out of the earth,

  your body is liquid in my hands, almost

  a piece of solid water.

  Time is what we're doing,

  I'm falling into the flesh,

  into the sadness of the body

  that cannot give up its habits,

  habits of the hands and skin.

  I will be one of those old women

  with good bones and stringy necks

  who will not let go of anything.

  You'll be there. You'll keep

  your distance,

  the same one.

  Anchorage

  This is the sea then, once

  again, warm this time

  and swarming. Sores fester

  on your feet in the tepid

  beach water, where French

  wine bottles float among grape-

  fruit peels and the stench of death

  from the piles of sucked-out shells

  and emptied lunches.

  Here is a pool with nurse sharks

  kept for the tourists

  and sea turtles scummy with algae,

  winging their way through their closed

  heaven of dirty stones. Here

  is where the good ship Envious

  rides at anchor.

  The land is red with hibiscus

  and smells of piss; and here

  beside the houses built on stilts,

  warped in the salt and heat,

  they plant their fathers in the yards,

  cover them with cement

  tender as blankets:

  Drowned at sea, the same one

  the mermaids swim in, hairy

  and pallid, with rum on the beach after.

 
But that's a day trip.

  Further along, there are tents

  where the fishers camp,

  cooking their stews of claws

  and spines, and at dawn they steer

  further out than you'd think

  possible, between the killer

  water and the killer sun,

  carried on hollow pieces

  of wood with the names of women,

  not sweethearts

  only but mothers, clumsy

  and matronly, though their ribbed bodies

  are fragile as real bodies

 

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