Dearly: New Poems

by Margaret Atwood

Mirages, you decide: everything was never. Though over your shoulder there it is, your time laid out like a picnic in the sun, still glowing, although it’s night.

I put my hand on her forehead, stroke her wispy hair. How tall she used to be, how we’ve all dwindled. It’s time for her to go deeper, into the blizzard ahead of her, both dark and light, like snow. Why can’t I let go of her? Why can’t I let her go?

First taste of sheer ambrosia! Though mixed with ash and the shards of destruction as Heaven always is, if you read the texts closely.

I appear in other people’s dreams much oftener than I used to. Sometimes naked, they say, or cooking: I seem to cook a lot. Sometimes as an old dog carrying a rolled-up letter in snaggle teeth, addressed to: Soon. Sometimes as a skeleton in a green satin frock. I’m always there for a reason, so the dreamers tell me; I wouldn’t know.

Me, it’s the heart: that’s the part lacking. I used to want one: a dainty cushion of red silk dangling from a blood ribbon, fit for sticking pins in. But I’ve changed my mind. Hearts hurt.

That room has been static for me so long: an emptiness a void a silence containing an unheard story ready for me to unlock. Let there be plot.

So tempting, that midway faux-marble arch, both funfair and classical— so Greek, so Barnum, such a beacon, with a sign in gas-blue neon: Love! This way! In!

These were the kinds of stories we used to tell. They were comforting in a way because they said everyone has to be somewhere. But the dear ones, where are they? Where? Where? After a while You sound like a bird. You stop, but the sorrow goes on calling. It leaves you and flies out over the cold night fields, searching and searching, over the rivers, over the emptied air.

“Poetry is the past that breaks out in our hearts.” —RILKE

Spoons, however: there are no spoons in Nature, or not on animals. We imitate ourselves. Here, let me help you: two cupped hands

Everything once had a soul, even this clam, this pebble. Each had a secret name. Everything listened. Everything was real, but didn’t always love you. You needed to take care. We long to go back there, or so we like to feel when it’s not too cold. We long to pay that much attention. But we’ve lost the knack; also there’s other music. All we hear in the wind’s plainsong is the wind.

a mother whale carrying her child for three days, mourning its death from toxic plastic. So big and sad we can hardly grasp it: how did we do this by just living in the normal way, manoeuvring our way through package and wrapping, cutting our way to our food through the layer by layer that keeps it fresher, and doesn’t everyone? What happened before? How did we ever survive with only paper and glass and tin and hemp and leather and oilskin? But now there’s a dead whale right there on the screen: so big and sad something must be done. It will be! Will it be? Will we decide to, finally?

When the gods frown, the weather’s bad. When they smile the sun shines. We smile all the time now, smiles of the lobotomized, and the world fries. Sorry about that. We got stupid. We drink martinis and go on cruises. Whatever we touch turns red.

But nothing’s locked. There’s nothing to it. Never was. Just open. Just walk down.

Despite all this we’re travelling fast, we’re travelling faster than light. It’s almost next year, it’s almost last year, it’s almost the year before: familiar, but we can’t swear to it.

Birds don’t need them, those lost names. We needed them, but that was then. Now, who cares? Lions don’t know they are lions. They don’t know how brave they are.

Disenchanted corpse, they say. Inert. Emptied of prayer, limp to all conjures. A figment, a fragment. Lifeless. Less. Or are you? Or is it?

Dearly beloved, gathered here together in this closed drawer, fading now, I miss you. I miss the missing, those who left earlier. I miss even those who are still here. I miss you all dearly. Dearly do I sorrow for you. Sorrow: that’s another word you don’t hear much any more. I sorrow dearly.

Once, this old woman I’m conjuring up for you would have been my grandmother. Today it’s me. Years from now it might be you, if you’re quite lucky.