Selected Poems II (1976-1986)

by Margaret Atwood

  and like them also a memory,

  and like them also two hands

  held open, and like them also

  the last hope of safety.

  Georgia Beach

  In winter the beach is empty

  but south, so there is no snow.

  Empty can mean either

  peaceful or desolate.

  Two kinds of people walk here:

  those who think they have love

  and those who think they are without it.

  I am neither one nor the other.

  I pick up the vacant shells,

  for which open means killed,

  saving only the most perfect,

  not knowing who they are for.

  Near the water there are skinless

  trees, fluid, grayed by weather,

  in shapes of agony, or you could say

  grace or passion as easily.

  In any case twisted.

  By the wind, which keeps going.

  The empty space, which is not empty

  space, moves through me.

  I come back past the salt marsh,

  dull yellow and rust-colored,

  which whispers to itself,

  which is sad only to us.

  A Sunday Drive

  The skin seethes in the heat

  which roars out from the sun, wave after tidal wave;

  the sea is flat and hot and too bright,

  stagnant as a puddle,

  edged by a beach reeking of shit.

  The city is like a city

  bombed out and burning;

  the smell of smoke is everywhere,

  drifting from the mounds of rubble.

  Now and then a new tower,

  already stained, lifts from the tangle;

  the cars stall and bellow.

  From the trampled earth rubbish erupts

  and huts of tin and warped boards

  and cloth and anything scavenged.

  Everything is the color of dirt

  except the kites, red and purple,

  three of them, fluttering cheerfully

  from a slope of garbage,

  and the women's dresses, cleaned somehow,

  vaporous and brilliant, and the dutiful

  white smiles of the child beggars

  who kiss your small change

  and press it to their heads and hearts.

  Uncle, they call you. Mother.

  I have never felt less motherly.

  The moon is responsible for all this,

  goddess of increase

  and death, which here are the same.

  Why try to redeem

  anything? In this maze

  of condemned flesh without beginning or end

  where the pulp of the body steams and bloats

  and spawns and multiplies itself

  the wise man chooses serenity.

  Here you are taught the need to be holy,

  to wash a lot and live apart.

  Burial by fire is the last mercy:

  decay is reserved for the living.

  The desire to be loved is the last illusion:

  Give it up and you will be free.

  Bombay, 1982

  Orpheus (1)

  You walked in front of me,

  pulling me back out

  to the green light that had once

  grown fangs and killed me.

  I was obedient, but

  numb, like an arm

  gone to sleep; the return

  to time was not my choice.

  By then I was used to silence.

  Though something stretched between us

  like a whisper, like a rope:

  my former name,

  drawn tight.

  You had your old leash

  with you, love you might call it,

  and your flesh voice.

  Before your eyes you held steady

  the image of what you wanted

  me to become: living again.

  It was this hope of yours that kept me following.

  I was your hallucination, listening

  and floral, and you were singing me:

  already new skin was forming on me

  within the luminous misty shroud

  of my other body; already

  there was dirt on my hands and I was thirsty.

  I could see only the outline

  of your head and shoulders,

  black against the cave mouth,

  and so could not see your face

  at all, when you turned

  and called to me because you had

  already lost me. The last

  I saw of you was a dark oval.

  Though I knew how this failure

  would hurt you, I had to

  fold like a gray moth and let go.

  You could not believe I was more than your echo.

  Eurydice

  He is here, come down to look for you.

  It is the song that calls you back,

  a song of joy and suffering

  equally: a promise:

  that things will be different up there

  than they were last time.

  You would rather have gone on feeling nothing,

  emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace

  of the deepest sea, which is easier

  than the noise and flesh of the surface.

  You are used to these blanched dim corridors,

  you are used to the king

  who passes you without speaking.

  The other one is different

  and you almost remember him.

  He says he is singing to you

  because he loves you,

  not as you are now,

  so chilled and minimal: moving and still

  both, like a white curtain blowing

  in the draft from a half-opened window

  beside a chair on which nobody sits.

  He wants you to be what he calls real.

  He wants you to stop light.

  He wants to feel himself thickening

  like a treetrunk or a haunch

  and see blood on his eyelids

  when he closes them, and the sun beating.

  This love of his is not something

  he can do if you aren't there,

  but what you knew suddenly as you left your body

  cooling and whitening on the lawn

  was that you love him anywhere,

  even in this land of no memory,

  even in this domain of hunger.

  You hold love in your hand, a red seed

  you had forgotten you were holding.

  He has come almost too far.

  He cannot believe without seeing,

  and it's dark here.

  Go back, you whisper,

  but he wants to be fed again

  by you. O handful of gauze, little

  bandage, handful of cold

  air, it is not through him

  you will get your freedom.

  The Robber Bridegroom

  He would like not to kill. He would like

  what he imagines other men have,

  instead of this red compulsion. Why do the women

  fail him and die badly? He would like to kill them gently,

  finger by finger and with great tenderness, so that

  at the end they would melt into him

  with gratitude for his skill and the final pleasure

  he still believes he could bring them

  if only they would accept him,

  but they scream too much and make him angry.

  Then he goes for the soul, rummaging

  in their flesh for it, despotic with self-pity,

  hunting among the nerves and the shards

  of their faces for the one thing

  he needs to live, and lost

  back there in the poplar and spruce forest

  in the watery moonlight, where his young bride,

  p
ale but only a little frightened,

  her hands glimmering with his own approaching

  death, gropes her way towards him

  along the obscure path, from white stone

  to white stone, ignorant and singing,

  dreaming of him as he is.

  Letter from Persephone

  This is for the left-handed mothers

  in their fringed black shawls or flowered housecoats

  of the 'forties, their pink mule slippers,

  their fingers, painted red or splay-knuckled

  that played the piano formerly.

  I know about your houseplants

  that always died, about your spread

  thighs roped down and split

  between, and afterwards

  that struggle of amputees

  under a hospital sheet that passed

  for sex and was never mentioned,

  your invalid mothers, your boredom,

  the enraged sheen of your floors;

  I know about your fathers

  who wanted sons.

  These are the sons

  you pronounced with your bodies,

  the only words you could

  be expected to say,

  these flesh stutters.

  No wonder this one

  is nearly mute, flinches when touched,

  is afraid of caves

  and this one threw himself at a train

  so he could feel his own heartbeat

  once anyway; and this one

  touched his own baby gently

  he thought, and it came undone;

  and this one enters the trussed bodies

  of women as if spitting.

  I know you cry at night

  and they do, and they are looking for you.

  They wash up here, I get

  this piece or that. It's a blood

  puzzle.

  It's not your fault

  either, but I can't fix it.

  No Name

  This is the nightmare you now have frequently:

  that a man will come to your house at evening

  with a hole in him—you place it

  in the chest, on the left side—and blood leaking out

  onto the wooden door as he leans against it.

  He is a man in the act of vanishing

  one way or another.

  He wants you to let him in.

  He is like the soul of a dead

  lover, come back to the surface of the earth

  because he did not have enough of it and is still hungry

  but he is far from dead. Though the hair

  lifts on your arms and cold

  air flows over your threshold

  from him, you have never

  seen anyone so alive

  as he touches, just touches your hand

  with his left hand, the clean

  one, and whispers Please

  in any language.

  You are not a doctor or anything like it.

  You have led a plain life

  which anyone looking would call blameless.

  On the table behind you

  there are bread on a plate, fruit in a bowl.

  There is one knife. There is one chair.

  It is spring, and the night wind

  is moist with the smell of turned loam

  and the early flowers;

  the moon pours out its beauty

  which you see as beauty finally,

  warm and offering everything.

  You have only to take.

  In the distance you hear dogs barking.

  Your door is either half open

  or half closed.

  It stays that way and you cannot wake.

  Orpheus (2)

  Whether he will go on singing

  or not, knowing what he knows

  of the horror of this world:

  He was not wandering among meadows

  all this time. He was down there

  among the mouthless ones, among

  those with no fingers, those

  whose names are forbidden,

  those washed up eaten into

  among the gray stones

  of the shore where nobody goes

  through fear. Those with silence.

  He has been trying to sing

  love into existence again

  and he has failed.

  Yet he will continue

  to sing, in the stadium

  crowded with the already dead

  who raise their eyeless faces

  to listen to him; while the red flowers

  grow up and splatter open

  against the walls.

  They have cut off both his hands

  and soon they will tear

  his head from his body in one burst

  of furious refusal.

  He foresees this. Yet he will go on

  singing, and in praise.

  To sing is either praise

  or defiance. Praise is defiance.

  The Words Continue Their Journey

  Do poets really suffer more

  than other people? Isn't it only

  that they get their pictures taken

  and are seen to do it?

  The loony bins are full of those

  who never wrote a poem.

  Most suicides are not

  poets: a good statistic.

  Some days though I want, still,

  to be like other people;

  but then I go and talk with them,

  these people who are supposed to be

  other, and they are much like us,

  except that they lack the sort of thing

  we think of as a voice.

  We tell ourselves they are fainter

  than we are, less defined,

  that they are what we are defining,

  that we are doing them a favor,

  which makes us feel better.

  They are less elegant about pain than we are.

  But look, I said us. Though I may hate your guts

  individually, and want never to see you,

  though I prefer to spend my time

  with dentists because I learn more,

  I spoke of us as we, I gathered us

  like the members of some doomed caravan

  which is how I see us, traveling together,

  the women veiled and singly, with that intumed

  sight and the eyes averted,

  the men in groups, with their moustaches

  and passwords and bravado

  in the place we're stuck in, the place we've chosen,

  a pilgrimage that took a wrong turn

  somewhere far back and ended

  here, in the full glare

  of the sun, and the hard red-black shadows

  cast by each stone, each dead tree lurid

  in its particulars, its doubled gravity, but floating

  too in the aureole of stone, of tree,

  and we're no more doomed really than anyone, as we

  together, through this moon terrain

  where everything is dry and perishing and so

  vivid, into the dunes, vanishing out of sight,

  vanishing out of the sight of each other,

  vanishing even out of our own sight,

  looking for water.

  Heart Test With an Echo Chamber

  Wired up at the ankles and one wrist,

  a wet probe rolling over my skin,

  I see my heart on a screen

  like a rubber bulb or a soft fig, but larger,

  enclosing a tentative double flutter,

  the rhythm of someone out of breath

  but trying to speak anyway; two valves opening

  and shutting like damp wings

  unfurling from a gray pupa.

  This is the heart as television,

  a softcore addiction

  of the afternoon. The heart

  as entertainment, out of date
/>   in black and white.

  The technicians watch the screen,

  looking for something: a block, a leak,

  a melodrama, a future

  sudden death, clenching

  of this fist which goes on

  shaking itself at fate.

  They say: It may be genetic.

  (There you have it, from science,

  what God has been whispering all along

  through stones, madmen and birds' entrails:

  hardness of the heart can kill you.)

  They change the picture:

  now my heart is cross-sectioned

  like a slice of textbook geology.

  They freeze-frame it, take its measure.

  A deep breath, they say.

  The heart gasps and plods faster.

  It enlarges, grows translucent,

  a glowing stellar

  cloud at the far end

  of a starscope. A pear

  made of smoke and about to rot.

  For once the blood and muscle

  heart and the heart of pure

  light are beating in unison,

  visibly.

  Dressing, I am diaphanous,

  a mist wrapping a flare.

  I carry my precarious

  heart, radiant and already