PAYBACK

"He realised that the bitch-goddess of Success had two main appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as writers and artists gave her; but the other grimmer appetite for meat and bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by men who made money in industry."

D.H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover 

"The dark side of the sense of fairness is the sense of unfairness, which results in gloating when you've got away with being unfair, or else guilt; and in rage and vengeance, when the unfairness has been visited upon you."

Margaret Atwood, PAYBACK

It's A Gas

the only sense

you'd like to have

is the two cents

i owe you

i woe you

i woe

for those

cents you have

been adding up

to ease yourself

will eat yourself

one day

at a time

Chained

Elegy For the Giant Tortoises

Let others pray for the passenger pigeon

the dodo, the whooping crane, the eskimo:

everyone must specialize

I will confine myself to a meditation

upon the giant tortoises

withering finally on a remote island

I concentrate in subway stations,

in parks, I can't quite see them,

they move to the peripheries of my eyes

but on the last day they will be there:

already the event

like a wave travelling shapes vision:

on the road where I stand they will materialize,

plodding past me in a straggling line

awkward without water

their small heads pondering

from side to side, their useless armour

sadder than tanks and history,

in their closed gaze ocean and sunlight paralysed

lumbering up the steps, under the archways

toward the square glass altars

where the brittle gods are kept,

the relics of what we have destroyed,

our holy and obsolete symbols.

Margaret Atwood

Comic Book Vs. History

Comic Book VS. History
(1949, 1969)


On the blackboard map your country
was erased, blank, waiting
to be filled with whatever shapes
we chose:

tense
needle turrets of steel
cities

heroes
lived there, we knew

they all wore capes, bullets
bounced off them;
from their fists came beautiful
orange collisions.

Our side was coloured in
with dots and letters
but it held only
real-sized explorers, confined
to animal skin coats;

they plodded, discovered
rivers whose names we always
forgot; in the winters
they died of scurvy.

When I reached that other
shore finally, statistics
and diseased labels multiplied
everywhere in my head

space contracted, the
red and silver
heroes had collapsed inside
their rubber suits/ the riddled
buildings were decaying
magic

I turned back, search
for the actual, collect lost
bones, burnt logs
of campfires, pieces of fur.

Margaret Atwood

No Man's Land

Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer


i
He stood, a point
on a sheet of green paper
proclaiming himself the centre,

with no walls, no borders
anywhere; the sky no height
above him, totally un-
enclosed
and shouted:

Let me out!


ii


He dug the soil in rows,
imposed himself with shovels
He asserted
into the furrows, I
am not random.

The ground replied with aphorisms:

a tree-sprout, a nameless
weed, words
he couldn't understand.

iii

The house pitched
the plot staked
in the middle of nowhere.

At night the mind
inside, in the middle
of nowhere.

The idea of an animal
patters across the roof.

In the darkness the fields
defend themselves with fences
in vain:

everything
is getting in

iv


By daylight he resisted.
He said, disgusted
with the swamp's clamourings and the outburts
of rocks.

This is not order
but the absence
of order.

He was wrong, the unanswering
forest implied:

It was an ordered absence

v


For many years
he fished for a great vision,
dangling the hooks of sown
roots under the surface
of the shallow earth.

It was like
enticing whales with a bent
pin. Besides he thought

in that country
only the worms were biting.

vi

If he had known unstructured
space is a deluge
and stocked his log house-
boat with all the animals

even the wolves,

he might have floated.

But obstinate he
stated, The land is solid
and stamped,

watching his foot sink
down through stone
up to the knee.

vii


Things
refused to name themselves; refused
to let him name them.

The wolves hunted
outside.

On his beaches, his clearings,
by the surf of under-
growth breaking
at his feet, he foresaw
disintegration

and in the end

through eyes
made ragged by his
effort, the tension
between subject and object,

the green
vision, the unnamed
whale invaded.


Margaret Atwood

Their Attitudes Differ

iii.

You held out your hand
I took your fingerprints

You asked for love
I gave you only descriptions

Please die I said
so I can write about it

After all you are quite
ordinary: 2 arms 2 legs
a head, a reasonable
body, toes & fingers, a few
eccentricities, a few honesties
but not too many, too many
postponements & regrets but

you'll adjust to it, meeting
deadlines and other
 people, pretending to love
the wrong woman some of the
time, listening to your brain
shrink, your diaries
expanding as you grow older,

growing older, of course you'll
die but not yet, you'll outlive
even my distortions of you

and there isn't anything
I want to do about the fact
that you are unhappy & sick

you aren't sick & unhappy
only alive & stuck with it.

yes at first you
go down smooth as
pills, all of me
breathes you in and then it's

a kick in the head, orange
and brutal, sharp jewels
hit and my
hair splinters

the adjectives
fall away from me, no
threads left holding
me, I flake apart
layer by
layer down
quietly to the bone, my skull
unfolds to an astounded flower

regrowing the body, learning
speech again takes
days and longer
each time/ too much of
this is fatal

Margaret Atwood