you would collaborate.
Poor boy, you'd say, he looks cold
standing out there, and he's only twenty.
From his point of view this must be hell.
A fur coat is what he needs,
a cup of tea, a cup of coffee,
a warm body.
Whether on the contrary
you'd slit his throat in his sleep
or in yours. I ask you.
So, you are a nice person.
You would behave well.
What you mean by behaving well.
When the outline of a man
whose face you cannot see
appears at your bedroom window,
whether you would shoot.
If you had a gun, that is.
Whether you would have a gun.
It goes on.
Machine. Gun. Nest.
The blood goes through your neck veins with a noise they call singing.
Time shatters like bad glass; you are this pinpoint of it.
Your feet rotting inside your boots, the skin of your chest
festering under the zippers, the waterproof armor,
you sit here, on the hill, a vantage point, at this X or scuffling in the earth, which they call a nest. Who chose that word?
Whatever you are you are not an egg, or a bird either.
Vipers perhaps is what was meant. Who cares now?
That is the main question: who cares. Not these pieces of paper
from somewhere known as home you fold, unread, in your pocket.
Each landscape is a state of mind, he once told me:
mountains for awe and remoteness, meadows for calm and the steam
of the lulled senses. But some views are slippery.
This place is both beautiful as the sun and full of menace:
dark green, with now and then a red splotch, like a punctured
vein, white like a flare; stench of the half-eaten.
Look at it carefully, see what it hides, or it will burst in your head.
If you lose your nerve you may die, if you don't lose it
you may die anyway, the joke goes. What is your nerve?
It is turning the world flat, the moon to a disc you could aim at,
popping the birds off the fence wire. Delight in accuracy,
no attention paid to results, dead singing, the smear of feathers.
You know you were more than that, but best to forget it.
There's no slack time for memory here; when you can, you plunge
into some inert woman as into a warm bath; for a moment
comforting, and of no consequence, like sucking your thumb.
No woman can imagine this. What you do to them
is therefore incidental, and also your just reward,
though sometimes, in a gap in the action, there's a space
for the concepts of sister, mother. Like folded laundry. They come
and go.
But stick your hand up a woman, alive or freshly-
dead, it is much like a gutted chicken:
giblets, a body cavity. Killing can be
merely a kind of impatience, at the refusal
of this to mean anything to you. He told me that.
You wanted to go in sharp and clean with a sword,
do what they once called battle. Now you just want your life.
There's not much limit to what you would do to get it.
Justice and mercy are words that happen in cool rooms, elsewhere.
Are you your brother's keeper? Yes or no, depending
what clothes he has on, what hair. There is more than one brother.
What you need to contend with now is the hard Easter-
eggshell blue of the sky, that shows you too clearly
the mass of deep green trees leaning slowly towards you
as if on the verge of speech, or annunciation.
More likely some break in the fabric of sight, or a sad mistake
you will hear about in the moment you make it. Some glint of
reflected light.
That whir in the space where your left hand was is not singing.
Death is the bird that hatches, is fed, comes flying.
The Rest
The rest of us watch from beyond the fence
as the woman moves with her jagged stride
into her pain as if into a slow race.
We see her body in motion
but hear no sounds, or we hear
sounds but no language; or we know
it is not a language we know
yet. We can see her clearly
but for her it is running in black smoke.
The clusters of cells in her swelling
like porridge boiling, and bursting,
like grapes, we think. Or we think of
explosions in mud; but we know nothing.
All around us the trees
and the grasses light up with forgiveness,
so green and at this time
of the year healthy.
We would like to call something
out to her. Some form of cheering.
There is pain but no arrival at anything.
Another Elegy
Strawberries, pears, fingers, the eyes
of snails: the other shapes water
takes. Even leaves are liquid
arrested. To die
is to dry, lose juice,
the sweet pulp sucked out. To enter
the time of rind and stone.
Your clothes hang shriveling
in the closet, your other body once
filled with your breath.
When I say body, what
is that a word for?
Why should the word you
remain attached to that suffering?
Wave upon wave, as we say.
I think of your hair burning
first, a scant minute
of halo; later, an afterglow
of bone, red slash of sunset.
The body a cinder or luminescent
saint, or Turner seascape.
Fine words, but why do I want
to tart up death?
Which needs no decoration,
which is only a boat,
plain and wooden
and ordinary, without eyes
painted on it,
sightless and hidden
in fog and going somewhere
else. Away from the shore.
My dear, my voyager, my scant handful
of ashes: I'd scatter you
if I could, this way, on the river.
A wave is neither form
nor energy. Both. Neither.
Galiano Coast: Four Entrances
i
The arbutus trees, with their bark like burned skin
that has healed, enclosing someone's real arms
in the moment of reaching, but not towards you:
you know they are paying no attention
to you and your failed love and equivocation.
Why do you wish to be forgiven by them?
Yet you are, and you breathe in,
and the new moon sheds grace without intention.
ii
You lie on your stomach
looking down through a crack between rocks:
the seaweed with its bladders and hairs,
the genital bodies hinted
by the pink flanges of limpets,
five starfish, each thickened purple arm
a drowning tongue,
the sea's membrane, with its wet shine
and pulse, and no promise.
There is no future,
really there is none
and no salvation
To know this is salvation
iii
Where the rock stops upland, thistles burning
at the tips, leaving their white ash
A result of the sun, this pentecost
and conflagration.
&
nbsp; Light flares up off the tidepool
where the barnacles grasp at the water
each with its one skeletal hand
which is also a frond
which is also a tongue
which is also a flame
you are praised by
iv
Sandrock the color of erosion,
pushed by the wind
into gills and clefts
and heavy folds like snow melting
or the crease of a doubled arm
There ought to be caves here
The sunlight
slides over the body like pollen
A door is about to open
onto paradise. Onto a beach like this one,
exactly like it, down to each thistle,
down to the red halfcrab eaten on the sand,
down to the rubber glove
gone white and blinded,
wedged in and stranded by the tide
down to the loss because you
can never truly be here.
Can this be paradise, with so much loss
in it?
Paradise
is defined by loss.
Is loss.
Is.
Squaw Lilies: Some Notes
Went up the steep stone hill, thinking,
My trick hip could fail me. Went up anyway
to see the flower with three names:
chocolate lilies, for the color,
stink lilies for the smell, red meat going off,
squaw lilies. Thought what I would be like, falling.
Brain spilled on the rocks.
Said to her: never seen these before. Why squaw?
Oh, she said, something to do
with the smell.
When she said that I felt as if painted
naked on an off-blue sofa
by a bad expressionist, ochre
and dirty greens, lips thickened with yellow
pigment, a red-infected
crevice dividing the splayed legs.
Thought: this is what it is, to be part
of the landscape. Subject to
depiction. Thought:
release the lilies. They have nothing
to do with these names for them.
Not even lilies.
Went down the steep stone hill. Did not fall.
Three Praises
***
The dipper, small dust-colored bird with robin
feet, walks on the stream bed
enclosed in its nimbus of silver
air, miraculous bubble, a non-miracle.
and liverwort on a dead log, earthstar,
hand, finger by finger.
***
For you, at last, I'd like to make
something uncomplicated; some neither god
nor goddess, not between, beyond
them; pinch it from dough,
bake it in the oven, a stone in its belly.
Stones lined up on the windowsill,
picked off some beach or other for being holy.
***
The hookworm, in the eye of
the universe, which is the unsteady gaze
of eternity maybe, is beloved. How could it not be,
living so blessed, in its ordained red meadows
of blood where it waves like a seaweed?
Praise be, it sings with its dracula mouth.
Praise be.
Not the Moon
What idiocy could transform the moon, that old sea-overgrown
skull seen from above, to a goddess of mercy?
You fish for the silver light, there on the quiet lake, so clear
to see; you plunge your hands into the water and come up empty.
Don't ask questions of stones. They will rightly ignore you,
they have shoulders but no mouths, their conversation is elsewhere.
Expect nothing else from the perfect white birdbones, picked clean
in the sedge in the cup of muskeg: you are none of their business.
Fresh milk in a glass on a plastic tray, a choice of breakfast
foods; we sit at the table, discussing the theories of tragedy.
The plump pink-faced men in the metal chairs at the edge of the
golf course
adding things up, sunning themselves, adding things up.
The corpse, washed and dressed, beloved meat pumped full of
chemicals
and burned, if turned back into money could feed two hundred.
Voluptuousness of the newspaper; scratching your back on the
bad news;
furious anger in spring sunshine, a plate of fruit on the table.
Ask of the apple, crisp heart, ask the pear or suave banana
which necks got sucked, whose flesh got stewed, so we could love
them.
The slug, a muscular jelly, slippery and luminous, dirty
eggwhite unrolling its ribbon of mucous—this too is delicious.
The oily slick, rainbow-colored, spread on the sewage
flats in the back field is beautiful also
as is the man's hand cut off at the wrist and nailed to a treetrunk,
mute and imploring, as if asking for alms, or held up in warning.
Who knows what it tells you? It does not say, beg, Have mercy,
it is too late for that. Perhaps only, I too was here once, where you are.
The star-like flower by the path, by the ferns, in the rain-
forest, whose name I did not know, and the war in the jungle—
the war in the jungle, blood on the crushed ferns, whose name I
do not
know, and the star-like flower grow out of the same earth
whose name I do not know. Whose name for itself I do not know.
Or much else, except that the moon is no goddess of mercy
but shines on us each damp warm night of her full rising
as if she were, and that is why we keep asking
the wrong questions, he said, of the wrong things. The questions
of things.
Ask the spider
what is the name of God, she will tell you: God is a spider.
Let the other moons pray to the moon. O Goddess of Mercy,
you who are not the moon, or anything we can see clearly,
we need to know each other's names and what we are asking.
Do not be any thing. Be the light we see by.
About the Author
MARGARET ATWOOD's poetry, like her fiction — including The Handmaid’s Tale and the Booker-winning The Blind Assassin — is known and acclaimed around the world. Her collection, Morning in the Burned House, won the Trillium Book Award in 1995. The author of more than forty works of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and books for children, Atwood has received top honors and awards in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries. She lives in Toronto. In 2008, Atwood was awarded the prestigious Prince of Asturias Award Laureate for Letters, considered to be the Spanish-language Nobel.