the circle game

the circle game

margaret atwood

INTRODUCTION BY

Sherrill grace

Copyright © 1966, 1998 by Margaret Atwood

Introduction copyright © 1978, 1998 by House of Anansi Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Atwood, Margaret, 1939–

The circle game

Poems.

ISBN 0-88784-629-7

I. Title.

PS8501.T86C57 1998 C811’.54 C98-931443-X

PR9199.3.A78C57 1998

The sequence The Circle Game first appeared as a series of lithographs by Charles Pachter. Some of the other poems first appeared in Alaska Review, The Canadian Forum, Edge, English, Evidence, Kayak, Prism International, and Queen’s Quarterly.

Cover Design: Bill Douglas at The Bang

Typesetting: ECW Type & Art, Oakville

Printed and Bound in Canada

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For J.

CONTENTS

Introduction by Sherrill Grace

This Is a Photograph of Me

After the Flood, We

A Messenger

Evening Trainstation, Before Departure

An Attempted Solution for Chess Problems

In My Ravines

A Descent Through the Carpet

Playing Cards

Man with a Hook

The City Planners

On the Streets, Love

Eventual Proteus

A Meal

The Circle Game

Camera

Winter Sleepers

Spring in the Igloo

A Sibyl

Migration: C.P.R.

Journey to the Interior

Some Objects of Wood and Stone

Pre-Amphibian

Against Still Life

The Islands

Letters, Towards and Away

A Place: Fragments

The Explorers

The Settlers

INTRODUCTION

by Sherrill Grace

Margaret Atwood’s first major book of poetry, The Circle Game, won her the Governor General’s Award for 1966, and in many other ways announced her arrival as an important contemporary poet. The title poem first appeared in a limited folio edition in 1965, designed, illustrated, and printed by Charles Pachter. Contact Press then published the entire collection in 1966, but this edition quickly went out of print and a new one was published the following year by House of Anansi Press. In her Selected Poems (1976), Margaret Atwood included fewer than half of the poems that appear in the original Circle Game, and hence the reader of the Selected has only a limited sense of the book as a unified whole. This Anansi reprinting, then, is especially welcome, for it indicates the lasting importance of the collection and provides an opportunity to reconsider the first major work of one of our finest writers.

Upon publication, the book was generally wellreceived and most reviewers recognized the appearance of an authentic and distinctive voice. However, certain fallacies which have always plagued the understanding of Atwood’s work arose in these early reviews: she was labelled an autobiographical writer in the narrowest sense and as a “mythopoeic poet” who followed the precepts of the so-called Frye school. Further misreading of her work was to come later with the publication of The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Power Politics (1971), and Survival (1972), and her adoption by American feminists and Canadian nationalists.

If one compares Atwood’s earlier poems — those published in Alphabet or in her first chapbook, Double Persephone, for example — with the poems in The Circle Game, one is struck by The Circle Game’s maturity, its new assurance of voice, form, and approach. The acerbic wit, the cool detachment, and the authority and control, now recognized as integral to the Atwood voice, are present in The Circle Game, as well as the distinctive aural-visual dynamic of the style, and Atwood’s intense preoccupation with the double aspect of life. Also characteristic is the spareness of the punctuation (except for parentheses), the controlled patterning of the lines and section breaks. Thematically, Atwood here explores many of the concerns that have continued to intrigue her — the traps of reality, myth, language, and the pernicious roles we play, the cage of the self, and above all, the nature of human perception.

Although one must be wary of forcing too rigid an order upon the poems, the arrangement of The Circle Game does suggest a definite pattern. The opening poems present a variety of circle games within which the speaker struggles for an escape. The growing sense of defeat and impasse climaxes in the title poem, “The Circle Game,’ when the speaker realizes that she wants to break the circle. Several poems follow in which the speaker tries various escape-routes, until a sense of equilibrium is attained in the final three poems. This balance occurs, in part, through the development of both the reader’s and the speaker’s perception. The opening poem, “This Is a Photograph of Me,” challenges our perception immediately, asking us to adjust our sights, to find out where this particular voice is coming from. If we can learn how to do this, the voice promises us that “eventually/you will be able to see me.” The ironic double structure of this poem, its emphasis on seeing, and its sharp visual imagery urges us to rediscover our senses and our relationship with the world.

The title poem portrays the danger of misperceiving the roles we assume and the games we play in our personal relations. Images of rooms, mirrors, and circles create the sense of claustrophobic entrapment:

Being with you

here, in this room

is like groping through a mirror

whose glass has melted

to the consistency

of gelatin

You refuse to be

(and I)

an exact reflection, yet

will not walk from the glass,

be separate.

Underlying this apparent impasse is the perception that the alteration of things will be destructive for both partners: the speaker is “transfixed/by your eyes’/ cold blue thumbtacks”. But she also knows that “there is no joy” in the game, and that she wants “the circle/ broken”, regardless of the cost.

Most of the poems in the collection focus upon the tension between opposites, whether male/female, order / chaos, day/night, rooms/open spaces, or the larger polarities of stasis and movement, self and other. “Journey to the Interior” explores the labyrinth of the self. It is as if the speaker in the earlier poems, having found escape from circle games impossible, has withdrawn into the self only to discover that she is enclosed in the final, most dangerous circle: “it is easier for me to lose my way/forever here, than in other landscapes”. The alternative is to abandon the egocentric self. In “Journey to the Interior,” Atwood expands the self-as-landscape metaphor, introduced in “This Is a Photograph of Me” and appearing again in the final poems of the book, because to see the self as other, as landscape, is a possible way out of the circle.

Another path to freedom, in “Pre-Amphibian,” is sleep, where one is

released

from the lucidities of day

when you are something I can

trace a line around …

But this release is short-lived. We wake soon “with sunlight steaming merciless on the shores of morning”. In “Some Objects of Wood and Stone,” the speaker finds concrete comfort in physical objects, pebbles, and carvings. Through these objects, “single and/solid and rounded and really / there”, she is able to bypass the treachery of words and the limitations of sight. In “Against Still Life,” as the title implies, the speaker is determined to crack silences and force life to unfold its meaning.

Release from circle games, tentative and rudimentary though it is, occurs in the last three poems. In “A Place: Fragments,” the speaker realizes that meaning does exist, not in opposition to “this confusion, this largeness/ and dissolving:/… but one/with it”. “The Explorers” and “The Settlers” depict life pared down to the essentials of bones and salt seas. Perhaps the deaths described in “The Explorers” are both necessary and propitious. At least they point forward to the harmony of “The Settlers,” where “our inarticulate/skeleton” is no longer “two skeletons”, but intermixed and one. The speaking voice in both these poems is neither trapped within circles nor immobilized by antinomies. This voice recalls the speaker in “This Is a Photograph of Me,’ in that it comes from beyond the circle of self and is “one with” the land. Consequently, the final lines of “The Settlers” are both beautiful and reassuring:

Now horses graze

inside this fence of ribs, and

children run, with green

smiles, (not knowing

where) across

the fields of our open hands.

These simple images of happy children at one with nature offer an alternative vision to the earlier traps of self and reason.

In The Circle Game, Margaret Atwood explores the fallibility of human perception and the concomitant dangers of the egocentric self. Whether in our use of language, our relationships with others, or our understanding of history and place, we distort and delimit life; our eyes are “cold blue thumbtacks”, our love affairs are joyless circle games, our words are barriers, and our cities are straight lines restraining panic. Freedom, these poems proclaim, is both necessary and dangerous. Consolation is possible via touch and physical objects, but in order to find that “place of absolute/ unformed beginning” for which the speaker longs in “Migration: C.P.R.,” we must return ourselves to fragments, bones, and salt seas.

The sense of negation in the last poems, however, cannot be mistaken for nihilism. The reduction of self to its elements bears no relation to the tense weariness in “Eventual Proteus” where the lovers are little more than “voices/ abraded with fatigue”. In terms of voice, image, even form, The Circle Game ends by answering the challenge of “This Is a Photograph of Me.” There the speaker promised that if we looked long enough we could see her. In “A Place: Fragments,” we are told that eyesight is insufficient, that “An other sense tugs at us”. The alternative to circle games is

something not lost or hidden

but just not found yet

that informs, holds together

this confusion, this largeness

and dissolving:

not above or behind

or within it, but one

with it: an

identity:

something too huge and simple

for us to see.

Sherrill Grace is the head of the English Department at the University of British Columbia. She teaches modern and Canadian literature, and specializes in Canadian Cultural Studies. She has written widely on Margaret Atwood.

the circle game

This Is a Photograph of Me

It was taken some time ago.

At first it seems to be

a smeared

print: blurred lines and grey flecks

blended with the paper;

then, as you scan

it, you see in the left-hand corner

a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree

(balsam or spruce) emerging

and, to the right, halfway up

what ought to be a gentle

slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,

and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken

the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the centre

of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where

precisely, or to say

how large or small I am:

the effect of water

on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,

eventually

you will be able to see me.)

After the Flood, We

We must be the only ones

left, in the mist that has risen

everywhere as well

as in these woods

I walk across the bridge

towards the safety of high ground

(the tops of the trees are like islands)

gathering the sunken

bones of the drowned mothers

(hard and round in my hands)

while the white mist washes

around my legs like water;

fish must be swimming

down in the forest beneath us,

like birds, from tree to tree

and a mile away

the city, wide and silent,

is lying lost, far undersea.

You saunter beside me, talking

of the beauty of the morning,

not even knowing

that there has been a flood,

tossing small pebbles

at random over your shoulder

into the deep thick air,

not hearing the first stumbling

footsteps of the almost-born

coming (slowly) behind us,

not seeing

the almost-human

brutal faces forming

(slowly)

out of stone.

A Messenger

The man came from nowhere

and is going nowhere

one day he suddenly appeared

outside my window

suspended in the air

between the ground and the tree bough

I once thought all encounters

were planned:

newspaper boys passing

in the street, with cryptic

headlines, waitresses and their coded

menus, women standing in streetcars

with secret packages, were sent to

me. And gave some time

to their deciphering

but this one is clearly

accidental; clearly this one is

no green angel, simple black and white

fiend; no ordained

messenger; merely

a random face

revolving outside the window

and if no evident abstract

significance, then

something as contingent

as a candidate for marriage

in this district of exacting neighbours:

not meant for me personally

but generic: to be considered

from all angles (origin; occupation;

aim in life); identification

papers examined; if appropriate,

conversed with; when

he can be made to descend.

Meanwhile, I wonder

which of the green or

black and white

myths he swallowed by mistake

is feeding on him like a tapeworm

has raised him from the ground

and brought him to this window

swivelling from some invisible rope

his particular features

fading day by day

his eyes melted

first; Thursday

his flesh became translucent

shouting at me

(specific) me

desperate messages with his

obliterated mouth

in a silent language

Evening Trainstation, Before Departure

It seems I am always

moving

(and behind me the lady

slumped in darkness

on a wooden bench

in the park, thinking

of nothing: the screams

of the children

going down the slide

behind her, topple her mind

into deep trenches)

moving

(and in front of me the man

standing in a white room

three flights up, a razor

(or is the evening

a razor) poised in his hand

considering

what it is for)

move with me.

Here I am in

a pause in space

hunched on the edge

of a tense suitcase

(in which there is a gathering

of soiled clothing, plastic bottles,

scissors, barbed wire

and a lady

and a man)

In a minute everything will begin

to move: the man

will tumble from the room, the lady

will take the razor in her black-gloved hand

and I will get on the train

and move elsewhere once more.

At the last station

under the electric clock

there was a poster: Where?

part of some obscure campaign;

at this one there is a loudspeaker

that calls the names and places

(the sounds like static; the silences

thin as razorblades between)

at the next one there will be

a lady and a man,

some other face or evidence

to add to the

collection in my suitcase.

The world is turning

me into evening.

I’m almost ready:

this time it will be far.

I move

and live on the edges

(what edges)

I live

on all the edges there are.

An Attempted Solution for Chess Problems

My younger sister at the chessboard

ponders her next move

the arrangement of her empire

(crosslegged on the floor)

while below her in the cellar

the embroidered costumes, taken

from her mother’s storage trunks

and lined against the walls

lose their stiff directions in

the instant that she hesitates

above the armies

The shadows of the chessmen

stretch, fall across her: she

is obsessed by history;

each wooden totem rises

like the cairn of an event

(but)

Outside the windows of this room

the land unrolls without landmark

a meshing of green on green, the inner

membrane of the gaping moment

opening around a sun that is

a hole burnt in the sky.

The house recoils

from the brightedged vacancy

of leaves, into itself: the cellar

darkness looming with archaic

silver clocks, brocaded chairs, the fading echoes

of a hunting horn.

The white king moves

by memories and procedures

and corners

no final ending but

a stalemate,

forcing her universe to his

geographies: the choice imposes

vestiges of black and white

ruled squares on the green landscape,

and her failed solution

has planted the straight rows

of an armoured wood patrolled by wooden

kings and queens

hunting the mechanical unicorn

under a coin-round sun.

Her step on the stairs

sounds through the concrete mazes.

In her cellar the mailed

costumes rustle

waiting to be put on.

In My Ravines

This year in my ravines

it was warm for a long time

although the leaves fell early

and my old men, remembering themselves

walked waist-high through the

yellow grass

in my ravines, through

alders and purple

fireweed, with burrs

catching on their sleeves,

watching the small boys climbing

in the leafless trees

or throwing pebbles

at tin cans floating

in the valley creek, or following

the hard paths worn by former

walkers or the hooves

of riding-stable horses

and at night

they slept under the bridges

of the city in my (still)

ravines

old men, ravelled as thistles

their clothing gone to seed

their beards cut stubble

while the young boys

climbed and swung

above them wildly

in the leafless eyelid

veins and branches

of a bloodred night

falling, bursting purple

as ancient rage, in

old men’s

dreams of slaughter

dreams of

(impossible)

flight.

A Descent Through the Carpet

i

Outside the window the harbour is

a surface only with mountains and

sailboats and

destroyers

depthless on the glass

but inside there’s a

patterned carpet on the floor

maroon green purple

brittle fronds and hard

petals

It makes the sea

accessible

as I stretch out with these

convoluted gardens

at eyelevel,

the sun

filtering down through the windows

of this housetop aquarium

and in the green halflight

I drift down past the

marginal orchards branched

colourful

feathered

and overfilled

with giving

into the long iceage

the pressures

of winter

the snowfall endless in the sea

ii

But not

rocked not cradled not forgetful:

there are no

sunken kingdoms no

edens in the waste ocean

among the shattered

memories of battles

only the cold jewelled symmetries

of the voracious eater

the voracious eaten

the dream creatures that glow

sulphurous in darkness or

flash like neurons

are blind, insatiable, all

gaping jaws and famine

and here

to be aware is

to know total

fear.

iii

Gunshot

outside the window

nine o’clock

Somehow I sit up

breaking the membrane of water

Emerged and

beached on the carpet

breathing this air once more

I stare

at the sackful of scales and

my fisted

hand

my skin

holds

remnants of ancestors

fossil bones and fangs

acknowledgement:

I was born

dredged up from time

and harboured

the night these wars began.

Playing Cards

In this room we are always in:

tired with all the other games

we get out cards and play

at double

solitaire:

the only thing

either of us might win.

There’s a queen.

Or rather two of them

joined at the waist, or near

(you can’t tell where

exactly, under the thick

brocaded costume)

or is it one

woman with two heads?

Each has hair drawn back

made of lines

and a half-smile that is part

of a set pattern.

Each holds a golden flower

with five petals, ordered

and unwilting.

Outside there is a lake

or this time is it a street

There’s a king (or kings)

too, with a beard to show

he is a man

and something abstract

in his hand

that might be either

a sceptre or a sword.

The colour doesn’t matter,

black or red:

there’s little choice between

heart and spade.

The important things

are the flowers and the swords;

but they stay flat,

are cardboard.

Outside there is a truck

or possibly a motorboat

and in this lighted room

across the table, we

confront each other

wearing no costumes.

You have nothing

that serves the function of a sceptre

and I have

certainly

no flowers.

Man with a Hook

This man I

know (about a year

ago, when he was young) blew

his arm off in the cellar

making bombs

to explode the robins

on the lawns.

Now he has a hook

instead of hand;

It is an ingenious

gadget, and comes

with various attachments:

knife for meals,

pink plastic hand for everyday

handshakes, black stuffed leather glove

for social functions.

I attempt pity

But, Look, he says, glittering

like a fanatic, My hook

is an improvement:

and to demonstrate

lowers his arm: the steel questionmark turns and opens,

and from his burning

cigarette

unscrews

and holds the delicate

ash: a thing

precise

my clumsy tenderskinned pink fingers

couldn’t do.

The City Planners

Cruising these residential Sunday

streets in dry August sunlight:

what offends us is

the sanities:

the houses in pedantic rows, the planted

sanitary trees, assert

levelness of surface like a rebuke

to the dent in our car door.

No shouting here, or

shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt

than the rational whine of a power mower

cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

But though the driveways neatly

sidestep hysteria

by being even, the roofs all display

the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,

certain things;

the smell of spilled oil a faint

sickness lingering in the garages,

a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,

a plastic hose poised in a vicious

coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give momentary access to

the landscape behind or under

the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsized, will slide

obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers

that right now nobody notices.

That is where the City Planners

with the insane faces of political conspirators

are scattered over unsurveyed

territories, concealed from each other,

each in his own private blizzard;

guessing directions, they sketch

transitory lines rigid as wooden borders

on a wall in the white vanishing air

tracing the panic of suburb

order in a bland madness of snows.

On the Streets, Love

On the streets

love

these days

is a matter for

either scavengers

(turning death to life) or

(turning life

to death) for predators

(The billboard lady

with her white enamel

teeth and red

enamel claws, is after

the men

when they pass her

never guess they have brought her

to life, or that her

body’s made of cardboard, or in her

veins flows the drained

blood of their desire)

(Look, the grey man

his footsteps soft

as flannel,

glides from his poster

and the voracious women, seeing

him so trim,

edges clear as cut paper

eyes clean

and sharp as lettering,

want to own him

… are you dead? are you dead?

they say, hoping …)

Love, what are we to do

on the streets these days

and how am I

to know that you

and how are you to know

that I, that

we are not parts of those

people, scraps glued together

waiting for a chance

to come to life

(One day

I’ll touch the warm

flesh of your throat, and hear

a faint crackle of paper

or you, who think

that you can read my mind

from the inside out, will taste the

black ink on my tongue, and find

the fine print written

just beneath my skin.)

Eventual Proteus

I held you

through all your shifts

of structure: while your bones turned

from caved rock back to marrow,

the dangerous

fur faded to hair

the bird’s cry died in your throat

the treebark paled from your skin

the leaves from your eyes

till you limped back again

to daily man:

a lounger on streetcorners

in iron-shiny gabardine

a leaner on stale tables;

at night a twitching sleeper

dreaming of crumbs and rinds and a sagging woman,

caged by a sour bed.

The early

languages are obsolete.

These days we keep

our weary distances:

sparring in the vacant spaces

of peeling rooms

and rented minutes, climbing

all the expected stairs, our voices

abraded with fatigue,

our bodies wary.

Shrunk by my disbelief

you cannot raise

the green gigantic skies, resume

the legends of your disguises:

this shape is final.

Now, when you come near

attempting towards me across

these sheer cavernous

inches of air

your flesh has no more stories

or surprises;

my face flinches

under the sarcastic

tongues of your estranging

fingers,

the caustic remark of your kiss.

A Meal

We sit at a clean table

eating thoughts from clean plates

and see, there is my heart

germfree, and transparent as glass

and there is my brain, pure

as cold water in the china

bowl of my skull

and you are talking

with words that fall spare

on the ear like the metallic clink

of knife and fork.

Safety by all means;

so we eat and drink

remotely, so we pick

the abstract bone

but something is hiding

somewhere

in the scrubbed bare

cupboard of my body

flattening itself

against a shelf

and feeding

on other people’s leavings

a furtive insect, sly and primitive

the necessary cockroach

in the flesh

that nests in dust.

It will sidle out

when the lights have all gone off

in this bright room

(and you can’t

crush it in the dark then

my friend or search it out

with your mind’s hands that smell

of insecticide and careful soap)

In spite of our famines

it keeps itself alive

: how it gorges on a few

unintentional

spilled crumbs of love

The Circle Game

i

The children on the lawn

joined hand to hand

go round and round

each arm going into

the next arm, around

full circle

until it comes

back into each of the single

bodies again

They are singing, but

not to each other:

their feet move

almost in time to the singing

We can see

the concentration on

their faces, their eyes

fixed on the empty

moving spaces just in

front of them.

We might mistake this

tranced moving for joy

but there is no joy in it

We can see (arm in arm)

as we watch them go

round and round

intent, almost

studious (the grass

underfoot ignored, the trees

circling the lawn

ignored, the lake ignored)

that the whole point

for them

of going round and round

is (faster

slower)

going round and round

ii

Being with you

here, in this room

is like groping through a mirror

whose glass has melted

to the consistency

of gelatin

You refuse to be

(and I)

an exact reflection, yet

will not walk from the glass,

be separate.

Anyway, it is right

that they have put

so many mirrors here

(chipped, hung crooked)

in this room with its high transom

and empty wardrobe; even

the back of the door

has one.

There are people in the next room

arguing, opening and closing drawers

(the walls are thin)

You look past me, listening

to them, perhaps, or

watching

your own reflection somewhere

behind my head,

over my shoulder

You shift, and the bed

sags under us, losing its focus

There is someone in the next room

There is always

(your face

remote, listening)

someone in the next room.

iii

However,

in all their games

there seems

to be some reason

however

abstract they

at first appear

When we read them legends

in the evening

of monstrous battles, and secret

betrayals in the forest

and brutal deaths,

they scarcely listened;

one yawned and fidgeted; another

chewed the wooden handle

of a hammer;

the youngest one examined

a slight cut on his toe,

and we wondered how

they could remain

completely without fear

or even interest

as the final sword slid through

the dying hero.

The next night

walking along the beach

we found the trenches

they had been making:

fortified with pointed sticks

driven into the sides

of their sand moats

and a lake-enclosed island

with no bridges:

a last attempt

(however

eroded by the water

in an hour)

to make

maybe, a refuge human

and secure from the reach

of whatever walks along

(sword hearted)

these night beaches.

iv

Returning to the room:

I notice how

all your word-

plays, calculated ploys

of the body, the witticisms

of touch, are now

attempts to keep me

at a certain distance

and (at length) avoid

admitting I am here

I watch you

watching my face

indifferently

yet with the same taut curiosity

with which you might regard

a suddenly discovered part

of your own body:

a wart perhaps,

and I remember that

you said

in childhood you were

a tracer of maps

(not making but) moving

a pen or a forefinger

over the courses of the rivers,

the different colours

that mark the rise of mountains;

a memorizer

of names (to hold

these places

in their proper places)

So now you trace me

like a country’s boundary

or a strange new wrinkle in

your own wellknown skin

and I am fixed, stuck

down on the outspread map

of this room, of your mind’s continent

(here and yet not here, like

the wardrobe and the mirrors

the voices through the wall

your body ignored on the bed),

transfixed

by your eyes’

cold blue thumbtacks

v

The children like the block

of grey stone that was once a fort

but now is a museum:

especially

they like the guns

and the armour brought from

other times and countries

and when they go home

their drawings will be full

for some days, of swords

archaic sunburst maces

broken spears

and vivid red explosions.

While they explore

the cannons

(they aren’t our children)

we walk outside along

the earthworks, noting

how they are crumbling

under the unceasing

attacks of feet and flower roots;

The weapons

that were once outside

sharpening themselves on war

are now indoors

there, in the fortress,

fragile

in glass cases;

Why is it

(I’m thinking

of the careful moulding

round the stonework archways)

that is this time, such

elaborate defences keep

things that are no longer

(much)

worth defending?

vi

And you play the safe

game the orphan game

the ragged winter game

that says, I am alone

(hungry: I know you want me

to play it also)

the game of the waif who stands

at every picture window,

shivering, pinched nose pressed

against the glass, the snow

collecting on his neck,

watching the happy families

(a game of envy)

Yet he despises them: they are so

Victorian Christmas-card:

the cheap paper shows

under the pigments of

their cheerful fire-

places and satin-

ribboned

suburban laughter

and they have their own forms

of parlour

games: father and mother

playing father and mother

He’s glad

to be left

out by himself

in the cold

(hugging himself).

When I tell you this,

you say (with a smile fake

as a tinsel icicle):

You do it too.

Which in some ways

is a lie, but also I suppose

is right, as usual:

although I tend to pose

in other seasons

outside other windows.

vii

Summer again;

in the mirrors of this room

the children wheel, singing

the same song;

This casual bed

scruffy as dry turf,

the counterpane

rumpled with small burrows, is

their grassy lawn

and these scuffed walls

contain their circling trees,

that low clogged sink

their lake

(a wasp comes,

drawn by the piece of sandwich

left on the nearby beach

(how carefully you do

such details);

one of the children flinches

but won’t let go)

You make them

turn and turn, according to

the closed rules of your games,

but there is no joy in it

and as we lie

arm in arm, neither

joined nor separate

(your observations change me

to a spineless woman in

a cage of bones, obsolete fort

pulled inside out),

our lips moving

almost in time to their singing,

listening to the opening

and closing of the drawers

in the next room

(of course there is always

danger but where

would you locate it)

(the children spin

a round cage of glass

from the warm air

with their thread-thin

insect voices)

and as we lie

here, caught

in the monotony of wandering

from room to room, shifting

the place of our defences,

I want to break

these bones, your prisoning rhythms

(winter,

summer)

all the glass cases,

erase all maps,

crack the protecting

eggshell of your turning

singing children:

I want the circle

broken.

Camera

You want this instant:

nearly spring, both of us walking,

wind blowing

walking

sunlight knitting the leaves before our eyes

the wind empty as Sunday

rain drying

in the wormy sidewalk puddles

the vestiges of night on our

lightscratched eyelids, our breezy fingers

you want to have it and so

you arrange us:

in front of a church, for perspective,

you make me stop walking

and compose me on the lawn;

you insist

that the clouds stop moving

the wind stop swaying the church

on its boggy foundations

the sun hold still in the sky

for your organized instant.

Camera man

how can I love your glass eye?

Wherever you partly are

now, look again

at your souvenir,

your glossy square of paper

before it dissolves completely:

it is the last of autumn

the leaves have unravelled

the pile of muddy rubble

in the foreground, is the church

the clothes I wore

are scattered over the lawn

my coat flaps in a bare tree

there has been a hurricane

that small black speck

travelling towards the horizon

at almost the speed of light

is me

Winter Sleepers

They lie side by side

under a thick quilt of silence.

The air silts up with snow.

The drifting land

merges with the inside room

gradually through the window

and the white sheet

swells and furrows

in the wind: no things

in this deep sleep are solid

only perhaps this floating

bed which holds them up, a life-

raft where they weather seas

that undulate with danger.

Under the bed the dust

eddies and collects;

dead leaves, broken

twigs, water-sodden

bones of small

animals gather

like sediment on the seafloor

under the snow.

Outside, the land

is filled with drowning men

and stretched remote close

beside her

he foundered and went down

some time before she knew.

Spring in the Igloo

The sun had been burning for a long time

before we saw it, and we saw it

only then because

it seared itself through the roof.

We, who thought we were living

in the centre of a vast night

and therefore spent our time

hoarding our own heat

were astonished by the light.

I made this house once

because I wanted the

coldest season, where you could be

if only by comparison, a

substitute for sun

but the earth

turns for its own reasons

ignoring mine, and these human

miscalculations

and so we are drifting

into a tepid ocean

on a shrinking piece of winter

(for two so frozen

this long in

glacial innocence

to swim would be

implausible)

with ice the only thing

between us and disaster.

A Sibyl

Below my window

in the darkening

backyard the children

play at war

among the flowerbeds

on my shelves the bottles

accumulate

my sibyl (every woman

should have one) has chosen

to live there

thin green wine bottles

emptied of small dinners

ovaltine jars, orange-brown

emptied of easy sleep

my sibyl crouches

in one of them

wrinkled as a pickled

baby, twoheaded prodigy

at a freakfair

hairless, her sightless

eyes like eggwhites

I stand looking

over the fading city

she calls to me with the many

voices of the children

not I want to die

but You must die

later or sooner alas

you were born weren’t you

the minutes thunder like guns

coupling won’t help you

or plurality

I see it

I prophesy

but she doesn’t reach me.

Old spider

sibyl, I’ll

uncork you

let in a little air

or I’ll ignore you.

Right now

my skin is a sack of

clever tricks, five

senses ribboned like birthday

presents unravel

in a torn web around me

and a man dances

in my kitchen, moving

like a metronome

with hopes of staying

for breakfast in the half-empty

bottle in his pocket

There are omens of

rockets among the tricycles

I know it

time runs out

in the ticking hips of the

man whose twitching skull

jerks on loose

vertebrae in my kitchen

flower

beds predict it

the city burns with an

afterglow of explosions as the

streetlights all come on

The thing that calls itself

I

right now

doesn’t care

I don’t care

I leave that to my

necessary sibyl

(that’s what she’s for)

with her safely bottled

anguish and her glass

despair

Migration: C.P.R.

i

Escaping from allegories

in the misty east, where inherited events

barnacle on the mind; where every gloved handshake

might be a finger pointing; you can’t look

in store windows without seeing

reflections/remnants of privateer

bones or methodist grandfathers with jaws

carved as wood pulpits warning

of the old evil; where not-quite-

forgotten histories

make the boards of lineal frame

farmhouses rotten

the fishermen

sit all day on old wharves facing

neither sea-

wards nor inland, mending

and untangling their old nets

of thought

and language is the law

we ran west

wanting

a place of absolute

unformed beginning

(the train

an ark

upheld on the brain’s darkness)

but the inner lakes reminded

us too much of ancient oceans

first flood: blood-

enemy and substance

(was our train like

an ark or like a seasnake?

and the prairies were so nearly

empty as prehistory

that each of the

few solid objects took some great

implication, hidden but

more sudden than a signpost

(like an inscribed shard, broken bowl

dug at a desert level

where they thought

no man had been,

or a burned bone)

(every dwarf tree portentous

with twisted wisdom, though

we knew no

apples grew there

and that shape, gazing

at nothing

by a hooftrampled streamside:

it could

have been a centaur)

and even the mountains

at the approach, were

conical, iconic

again:

(tents

in the desert? triangular

ships? towers? breasts?

words)

again

these barriers

ii

Once in the pass, the steep

faulted gorges were at last

real: we

tossed our eastern

suitcases from the caboose

and all our baggage:

overboard

left in our wake

along the tracks

and (we saw) our train became

only a train, in real

danger of falling; strained

speechless through those new mountains

we stepped

unbound

into

what a free emerging

on the raw

streets and hills

without meaning

always creeping up behind us

(that cold touch on the shoulder)

our faces scraped as blank

as we could wish them

(but needing new

houses, new

dishes, new

husks)

iii

There are more secondhand

stores here than we expected:

though we brought nothing with us

(we thought)

we have begun to unpack.

A residual brass bedstead

scratched with the initials

of generic brides and grooms;

chipped squat teapots: old totemic

mothers; a boxful

of used hats.

In the forest, even

apart from the trodden

paths, we can tell (from the sawn

firstumps) that many

have passed the same way

some time before

this (hieroglyphics

carved in the bark)

Things here grow from the ground

too insistently

green to seem

spontaneous. (My skeletons, I think,

will be still

in the windows when I look,

as well as the books

and the index-

fingered gloves.)

There is also a sea

that refuses to stay in the harbour:

becomes opaque

air or throws

brown seaweeds like small drowned hands

up on these shores

(the fishermen

are casting their nets here

as well)

and blunted mountains

rolling

(the first whales maybe?)

in the

inescapable mists.

Journey to the Interior

There are similarities

I notice: that the hills

which the eyes make flat as a wall, welded

together, open as I move

to let me through; become

endless as prairies; that the trees

grow spindly, have their roots

often in swamps; that this is a poor country;

that a cliff is not known

as rough except by hand, and is

therefore inaccessible. Mostly

that travel is not the easy going

from point to point, a dotted

line on a map, location

plotted on a square surface

but that I move surrounded by a tangle

of branches, a net of air and alternate

light and dark, at all times;

that there are no destinations

apart from this.

There are differences

of course: the lack of reliable charts;

more important, the distraction of small details:

your shoe among the brambles under the chair

where it shouldn’t be; lucent

white mushrooms and a paring knife

on the kitchen table; a sentence

crossing my path, sodden as a fallen log

I’m sure I passed yesterday

(have I been

walking in circles again?)

but mostly the danger:

many have been here, but only

some have returned safely.

A compass is useless; also

trying to take directions

from the movements of the sun,

which are erratic;

and words here are as pointless

as calling in a vacant

wilderness.

Whatever I do I must

keep my head. I know

it is easier for me to lose my way

forever here, than in other landscapes

Some Objects of Wood and Stone

i) Totems

We went to the park

where they kept the wooden people:

static, multiple

uprooted and trans-

planted.

Their faces were restored,

freshly-painted.

In front of them

the other wooden people

posed for each others’ cameras

and nearby a new booth

sold replicas and souvenirs.

One of the people was real.

It lay on its back, smashed

by a toppling fall or just

the enduring of minor winters.

Only one of the heads had

survived intact, and it was

also beginning to decay

but there was a

life in the progressing

of old wood back to

the earth, obliteration

that the clear-hewn

standing figures lacked.

As for us, perennial watchers,

tourists of another kind

there is nothing for us to worship;

no pictures of ourselves, no bluesky

summer fetishes, no postcards

we can either buy, or

smiling

be.

There are few totems that remain

living for us.

Though in passing,

through glass we notice

dead trees in the seared meadows

dead roots bleaching in the swamps.

ii) Pebbles

Talking was difficult. Instead

we gathered coloured pebbles

from the places on the beach

where they occurred.

They were sea-smoothed, sea-completed.

They enclosed what they intended

to mean in shapes

as random and necessary

as the shapes of words

and when finally

we spoke

the sounds of our voices fell

into the air single and

solid and rounded and really

there

and then dulled, and then like sounds

gone, a fistful of gathered

pebbles there was no point

in taking home, dropped on a beachful

of other coloured pebbles

and when we turned to go

a flock of small

birds flew scattered by the

fright of our sudden moving

and disappeared: hard

sea pebbles

thrown solid for an instant

against the sky

flight of words

iii) Carved Animals

The small carved

animal is passed from

hand to hand

around the circle

until the stone grows warm

touching, the hands do not know

the form of animal

which was made or

the true form of stone

uncovered

and the hands, the fingers the

hidden small bones

of the hands bend to hold the shape,

shape themselves, grow

cold with the stone’s cold, grow

also animal, exchange

until the skin wonders

if stone is human

In the darkness later

and even when the animal

has gone, they keep

the image of that

inner shape

hands holding warm

hands holding

the half-formed air

Pre-Amphibian

Again so I subside

nudged by the softening

driftwood of your body

tangle on you like a water-

weed caught

on a submerged treelimb

with sleep like a swamp

growing, closing around me

sending its tendrils through the brown

sediments of darkness

where we transmuted are

part of this warm rotting

of vegetable flesh

this quiet spawning of roots

released

from the lucidities of day

when you are something I can

trace a line around, with eyes

cut shapes

from air, the element

where we

must calculate according to

solidities

but here I blur

into you our breathing sinking

to green millenniums

and sluggish in our blood

all ancestors

are warm fish moving

The earth

shifts, bringing

the moment before focus, when

these tides recede; and we

see each other through the

hardening scales of waking

stranded, astounded

in a drying world

we flounder, the air

ungainly in our new lungs

with sunlight steaming merciless on the shores of morning

Against Still Life

Orange in the middle of a table:

It isn’t enough

to walk around it

at a distance, saying

it’s an orange:

nothing to do

with us, nothing

else: leave it alone

I want to pick it up

in my hand

I want to peel the

skin off; I want

more to be said to me

than just Orange:

want to be told

everything it has to say

And you, sitting across

the table, at a distance, with

your smile contained, and like the orange

in the sun: silent:

Your silence

isn’t enough for me

now, no matter with what

contentment you fold

your hands together; I want

anything you can say

in the sunlight:

stories of your various

childhoods, aimless journeyings,

your loves; your articulate

skeleton; your posturings; your lies.

These orange silences

(sunlight and hidden smile)

make me want to

wrench you into saying;

now I’d crack your skull

like a walnut, split it like a pumpkin

to make you talk, or get

a look inside

But quietly:

if I take the orange

with care enough and hold it

gently

I may find

an egg

a sun

an orange moon

perhaps a skull; centre

of all energy

resting in my hand

can change it to

whatever I desire

it to be

and you, man, orange afternoon

lover, wherever

you sit across from me

(tables, trains, buses)

if I watch

quietly enough

and long enough

at last, you will say

(maybe without speaking)

(there are mountains

inside your skull

garden and chaos, ocean

and hurricane; certain

corners of rooms, portraits

of great-grandmothers, curtains

of a particular shade;

your deserts; your private

dinosaurs; the first

woman)

all I need to know:

tell me

everything

just as it was

from the beginning.

The Islands

There are two of them:

One larger, with steep granite

cliffs facing us, dropping sheer

to the deep lake;

the other smaller, closer

to land, with a reef running

out from it and dead trees

grey, waist-high in the water.

We know they are alone

and always will be.

The lake takes care of that

and if it went,

they would be hills

and still demand

separateness

from the eye.

Yet, standing on the cliff

(the two

of us)

on our bigger island,

looking,

we find it pleasing

(it soothes our instinct for

symmetry, proportion,

for company perhaps)

that there are two of them.

Letters, Towards and Away

i

It is not available to us

it

is not available, I said

closing my hours against you.

I live in a universe

mostly paper.

I make tents

from cancelled stamps.

Letters

are permitted but

don’t touch me, I’d

crumple

I said

everything depends on you

staying away.

ii

I didn’t want you to be

visible.

How could you invade

me when

I ordered you not

to

Leave my evasions

alone

stay in the borders

I’ve drawn, I wrote, but

you twisted your own wide spaces

and made them include me.

iii

You came easily into my house

and without being asked

washed the dirty dishes,

because you don’t find

my forms of chaos,

inverted midnights

and crusted plates,

congenial:

restoring some kind of

daily normal order.

Not normal for me:

I live in a house where

beautiful clean dishes

aren’t important

enough.

iv

Love is an awkward word

Not what I mean and

too much like magazine stories

in stilted dentists’

waiting rooms.

How can anyone use it?

I’d rather say

I like your

lean spine

or your eyebrows

or your shoes

but just by standing there and

being awkward

you force me to speak

love.

v

You collapse my house of cards

merely by breathing

making other places

with your hands on wood, your

feet on sand

creating with such

generosity, mountains, distances

empty beach and rocks and sunlight

as you walk

so calmly into the sea

and returning, you

taste of salt,

and put together my own

body, another

place

for me to live

in.

vi

I don’t wear gratitude

well. Or hats.

What would I do with

veils and silly feathers

or a cloth rose

growing from the top of my head?

What should I do with this

peculiar furred emotion?

vii

What you invented

what you

destroyed

with your transient hands

you did so gently

I didn’t notice at the time

but where is all that wall-

paper?

Now

I’m roofless:

the sky

you built for me is too

open.

Quickly,

send me some more letters.

A Place: Fragments

i

Here on the rim, cringing

under the cracked whip of winter

we live

in houses of ice,

but not because we want to:

in order to survive

we make what we can and have to

with what we have.

ii

Old woman I visited once

out of my way

in a little-visited province:

she had a neat

house, a clean parlour

though obsolete and poor:

a cushion with a fringe;

glass animals arranged

across the mantlepiece (a swan, a horse,

a bull); a mirror;

a teacup sent from Scotland;

several heraldic spoons;

a lamp; and in the centre

of the table, a paperweight:

hollow glass globe

filled with water, and

a house, a man, a snowstorm.

The room was as

dustless as possible

and free of spiders.

I

stood in the door-

way, at the fulcrum where

this trivial but

stringent inner order

held its delicate balance

with the random scattering or

clogged merging of

things: ditch by the road; dried

reeds in the wind; flat

wet bush, grey sky

sweeping away outside.

iii

The cities are only outposts.

Watch that man

walking on cement as though on snowshoes:

senses the road

a muskeg, loose mat of roots and brown

vegetable decay

or crust of ice that

easily might break and

slush or water under

suck him down

The land flows like a

sluggish current.

The mountains eddy slowly towards the sea.

iv

The people who come here also

flow: their bodies becoming

nebulous, diffused, quietly

spreading out into the air across

these interstellar sidewalks

v

This is what it must be

like in outer space

where the stars are pasted flat

against the total

black of the expanding

eye, fly-

specks of burning dust

vi

There is no centre;

the centres

travel with us unseen

like our shadows

on a day when there is no sun.

We must move back:

there are too many foregrounds.

Now, clutter of twigs

across our eyes, tatter

of birds at the eye’s edge; the straggle

of dead treetrunks; patch

of lichen

and in love, tangle

of limbs and fingers, the texture

of pores and lines on the skin.

vii

An other sense tugs at us:

we have lost something,

some key to these things

which must be writings

and are locked against us

or perhaps (like a potential

mine, unknown vein

of metal in the rock)

something not lost or hidden

but just not found yet

that informs, holds together

this confusion, this largeness

and dissolving:

not above or behind

or within it, but one

with it: an

identity:

something too huge and simple

for us to see.

The Explorers

The explorers will come

in several minutes

and find this island.

(It is a stunted island,

rocky, with room

for only a few trees, a thin

layer of soil; hardly

bigger than a bed.

That is how

they’ve missed it

until now)

Already their boats draw near,

their flags flutter,

their oars push at the water.

They will be jubilant

and shout, at finding

that there was something

they had not found before,

although this island will afford

not much more than a foothold:

little to explore;

but they will be surprised

(we can’t see them yet;

we know they must be

coming, because they always come

several minutes too late)

(they won’t be able

to tell how long

we were cast away, or why,

or, from these

gnawed bones,

which was the survivor)

at the two skeletons

The Settlers

A second after

the first boat touched the shore,

there was a quick skirmish

brief as a twinge

and then the land was settled

(of course there was really

no shore: the water turned

to land by having

objects in it: caught and kept

from surge, made

less than immense

by networks of

roads and grids of fences)

and as for us, who drifted

picked by the sharks

during so many bluegreen

centuries before they came:

they found us

inland, stranded

on a ridge of bedrock,

defining our own island.

From our inarticulate

skeleton (so

intermixed, one

carcass),

they postulated wolves.

They dug us down

into the solid granite

where our bones grew flesh again,

came up trees and

grass.

Still

we are the salt

seas that uphold these lands.

Now horses graze

inside this fence of ribs, and

children run, with green

smiles, (not knowing

where) across

the fields of our open hands.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

Introduction

This Is a Photograph of Me

After the Flood, We

A Messenger

Evening Trainstation, Before Departure

An Attempted Solution for Chess Problems

In My Ravines

A Descent Through the Carpet

Playing Cards

Man with a Hook

The City Planners

On the Streets, Love

Eventual Proteus

A Meal

The Circle Game

Camera

Winter Sleepers

Spring in the Igloo

A Sibyl

Migration: C.P.R.

Journey to the Interior

Some Objects of Wood and Stone

Pre-Amphibian

Against Still Life

The Islands

Letters, Towards and Away

A Place: Fragments

The Explorers

The Settlers