Selected Poems II (1976-1986) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  From TWO-HEADED POEMS (1978)

  A Paper Bag

  The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart

  Five Poems for Dolls

  Five Poems for Grandmothers

  Marrying the Hangman

  Four Small Elegies

  Two-Headed Poems

  The Bus to Alliston, Ontario

  The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart

  Solstice Poem

  Marsh, Hawk

  A Red Shirt

  Night Poem

  All Bread

  You Begin

  From TRUE STORIES (1981)

  True Stories

  Landcrab I

  Landcrab II

  Postcard

  Nothing

  From NOTES TOWARDS A POEM THAT CAN NEVER BE WRITTEN

  A Conversation

  Flying Inside Your Own Body

  Torture

  A Women's Issue

  Christmas Carols

  Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written

  Vultures

  Sunset II

  Variation on the Word Sleep

  Mushrooms

  Out

  Blue Dwarfs

  Last Day

  From INTERLUNAR (1984)

  From SNAKE POEMS

  Snake Woman

  Bad Mouth

  Eating Snake

  Metempsychosis

  Psalm to Snake

  Quattrocento

  After Heraclitus

  From INTERLUNAR

  Bedside

  Precognition

  Keep

  Anchorage

  Georgia Beach

  A Sunday Drive

  Orpheus (1)

  Eurydice

  The Robber Bridegroom

  Letter from Persephone

  No Name

  Orpheus (2)

  The Words Continue Their Journey

  Heart Test With an Echo Chamber

  A Boat

  Interlunar

  NEW POEMS (1985–1986)

  Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony

  Porcupine Tree

  Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines

  Porcupine Meditation

  Aging Female Poet on Laundry Day

  Nightshade on the Way to School

  Mothers

  She

  Werewolf Movies

  How to Tell One Country From Another

  Machine. Gun. Nest.

  The Rest

  Another Elegy

  Galiano Coast: Four Entrances

  Squaw Lilies: Some Notes

  Three Praises

  Not the Moon

  About the Author

  Copyright © 1987 by Margaret Atwood

  All rights reserved

  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 II.

  I. Title.

  PR9199.3A8A17 1987 811'.54 87-3861

  ISBN 978-0-395-45406-0

  eISBN 978-0-544-14701-0

  v1.1212

  This book was published in a different form by Oxford University Press (Canada) in 1986.

  The poems reprinted in this collection are from Two-Headed Poems, True Stories, and lnterlunar, published by Oxford University Press (Canada). New poems have appeared in The Malahat Review, Exile, The Memphis State Review, and Poetry Australia.

  From TWO-HEADED POEMS (1978)

  A Paper Bag

  I make my head, as I used to,

  out of a paper bag,

  pull it down to the collarbone,

  draw eyes around my eyes,

  with purple and green

  spikes to show surprise,

  a thumb-shaped nose,

  a mouth around my mouth

  penciled by touch, then colored in

  flat red.

  With this new head, the body now

  stretched like a stocking and exhausted could

  dance again; if I made a

  tongue I could sing.

  An old sheet and it's Halloween;

  but why is it worse or more

  frightening, this pinface

  head of square hair and no chin?

  Like an idiot, it has no past

  and is always entering the future

  through its slots of eyes, purblind

  and groping with its thick smile,

  a tentacle of perpetual joy.

  Paper head, I prefer you

  because of your emptiness;

  from within you any

  word could still be said.

  With you I could have

  more than one skin,

  a blank interior, a repertoire

  of untold stories,

  a fresh beginning.

  The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart

  I do not mean the symbol

  of love, a candy shape

  to decorate cakes with,

  the heart that is supposed

  to belong or break;

  I mean this lump of muscle

  that contracts like a flayed biceps,

  purple-blue, with its skin of suet,

  its skin of gristle, this isolate,

  this caved hermit, unshelled

  turtle, this one lungful of blood,

  no happy plateful.

  All hearts float in their own

  deep oceans of no light,

  wetblack and glimmering,

  their four mouths gulping like fish.

  Hearts are said to pound:

  this is to be expected, the heart's

  regular struggle against being drowned.

  But most hearts say, I want, I want,

  I want, I want. My heart

  is more duplicitous,

  though no twin as I once thought.

  It says, I want, I don't want, I

  want, and then a pause.

  It forces me to listen,

  and at night it is the infra-red

  third eye that remains open

  while the other two are sleeping

  but refuses to say what it has seen.

  It is a constant pestering

  in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,

  a child's fist beating

  itself against the bedsprings:

  I want, I don't want.

  How can one live with such a heart?

  Long ago I gave up singing

  to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.

  One night I will say to it:

  Heart, be still,

  and it will.

  Five Poems for Dolls

  i

  Behind glass in Mexico

  this clay doll draws

  its lips back in a snarl;

  despite its beautiful dusty shawl,

  it wishes to be dangerous.

  ii

  See how the dolls resent us,

  with their bulging foreheads

  and minimal chins, their flat bodies

  never allowed to bulb and swell,

  their faces of little thugs.

  This is not a smile,

  this glossy mouth, two stunted teeth;

  the dolls gaze at us

  with the filmed eyes of killers.

  iii

  There have always been dolls

  as long as
there have been people.

  In the trash heaps and abandoned temples

  the dolls pile up;

  the sea is filling with them.

  What causes them?

  Or are they gods, causeless,

  something to talk to

  when you have to talk,

  something to throw against the wall?

  A doll is a witness

  who cannot die,

  with a doll you are never alone.

  On the long journey under the earth,

  in the boat with two prows,

  there were always dolls.

  iv

  Or did we make them

  because we needed to love someone

  and could not love each other?

  It was love, after all,

  that rubbed the skins from their gray cheeks,

  crippled their fingers,

  snarled their hair, brown or dull gold.

  Hate would merely have smashed them.

  You change, but the doll

  I made of you lives on,

  a white body leaning

  in a sunlit window, the features

  wearing away with time,

  frozen in the gaunt pose

  of a single day,

  holding in its plaster hand

  your doll of me.

  v

  Or: all dolls come

  from the land of the unborn,

  the almost-born; each

  doll is a future

  dead at the roots,

  a voice heard only

  on breathless nights,

  a desolate white memento.

  Or: these are the lost children,

  those who have died or thickened

  to full growth and gone away.

  The dolls are their souls or cast skins

  which line the shelves of our bedrooms

  and museums, disguised as outmoded toys,

  images of our sorrow,

  shedding around themselves

  five inches of limbo.

  Five Poems for Grandmothers

  i

  In the house on the cliff

  by the ocean, there is still a shell

  bigger and lighter than your head, though now

  you can hardly lift it.

  It was once filled with whispers;

  it was once a horn

  you could blow like a shaman

  conjuring the year,

  and your children would come running.

  You've forgotten you did that,

  you've forgotten the names of the children

  who in any case no longer run,

  and the ocean has retreated,

  leaving a difficult beach of gray stones

  you are afraid to walk on.

  The shell is now a cave

  which opens for you alone.

  It is still filled with whispers

  which escape into the room,

  even though you turn it mouth down.

  This is your house, this is the picture

  of your misty husband, these are your children, webbed

  and doubled. This is the shell,

  which is hard, which is still there,

  solid under the hand, which mourns, which offers

  itself, a narrow journey

  along its hallways of cold pearl

  down the cliff into the sea.

  ii

  It is not the things themselves

  that are lost, but their use and handling.

  The ladder first; the beach;

  the storm windows, the carpets;

  The dishes, washed daily

  for so many years the pattern

  has faded; the floor, the stairs, your own

  arms and feet whose work

  you thought defined you;

  The hairbrush, the oil stove

  with its many failures,

  the apple tree and the barrels

  in the cellar for the apples,

  the flesh of apples; the judging

  of the flesh, the recipes

  in tiny brownish writing

  with the names of those who passed them

  from hand to hand: Gladys,

  Lorna, Winnie, Jean.

  If you could only have them back

  or remember who they were.

  iii

  How little I know

  about you finally:

  The time you stood

  in the nineteenth century

  on Yonge Street, a thousand

  miles from home, with a brown purse

  and a man stole it.

  Six children, five who lived.

  She never said anything

  about those births and the one death;

  her mouth closed on a pain

  that could neither be told nor ignored.

  She used to have such a sense of fun.

  Now girls, she would say

  when we would tease her.

  Her anger though, why

  that would curl your hair,

  though she never swore.

  The worst thing she could say was:

  Don't be foolish.

  At eighty she had two teeth pulled out

  and walked the four miles home

  in the noon sun, placing her feet

  in her own hunched shadow.

  The bibbed print aprons, the shock

  of the red lace dress, the pin

  I found at six in your second drawer,

  made of white beads, the shape of a star.

  What did we ever talk about

  but food, health and the weather?

  Sons branch out, but

  one woman leads to another.

  Finally I know you

  through your daughters,

  my mother, her sisters,

  and through myself:

  Is this you, this edgy joke

  I make, are these your long fingers,

  your hair of an untidy bird,

  is this your outraged

  eye, this grip

  that will not give up?

  iv

  Some kind of ritual

  for your dwindling,

  some kind of dragon, small,

  benign and wooden

  with two mouths to catch your soul

  because it is wandering

  like a lost child, lift it back safely.

  But we have nothing; we say,

  How is she?

  Not so good, we answer,

  though some days she's fine.

  On other days you walk through

  the door of the room in the house

  where you've lived for seventy years

  and find yourself in a hallway

  you know you have never seen before.

  Midnight, they found her

  opening and dosing the door

  of the refrigerator:

  vistas of day-old vegetables, the used bone

  of an animal, and beyond that

  the white ice road that leads north.

  They said, Mother,

  what are you doing here?

  Nothing is finished

  or put away, she said.

  I don't know where I am.

  Against the disappearance

  of outlines, against

  the disappearance of sounds,

  against the blurring of the ears

  and eyes, against the small fears

  of the very old, the fear

  of mumbling, the fear of dying,

  the fear of falling downstairs,

  I make this charm

  from nothing but paper; which is good

  for exactly nothing.

  v

  Goodbye, mother

  of my mother, old bone

  tunnel through which I came.

  You are sinking down into

  your own veins, fingers

  folding back into the hand,

  day by day a slow retreat

  behind
the disk of your face

  which is hard and netted like an ancient plate.

  You will flicker in these words

  and in the words of others

  for a while and then go out.

  Even if I send them,

  you will never get these letters.

  Even if I see you again,

  I will never see you again.

  Marrying the Hangman

  She has been condemned to death by hanging, A man may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history.

  ***

  To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.

  ***

  In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the hangman. But there is no hangman, first she must create him, she must persuade this man at the end of the voice, this voice she has never seen and which has never seen her, this darkness, she must persuade him to renounce his face, exchange it for the impersonal mask of death, of official death which has eyes but no mouth, this mask of a dark leper. She must transform his hands so they will be willing to twist the rope around throats that have been singled out as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who else is there to marry?