Dearly: New Poems

by Margaret Atwood

Walking in the Madman’s Wood Walking in the madman’s wood over the disquieted dry shushing leaves in early spring. The madman loved this wildland once, before his brain turned lacework. Must have been him (when?) who put this round stone here, topping the mossy oblong. Mine. And all the tin can lids and wooden squares, rough-painted red and nailed to trees to mark his line: mine, mine, mine, mine. I shouldn’t say that cancelled word: madman. Maybe lost his mind? No, because we don’t have minds as such these days, but tiny snarls of firefly neural pathways signalling no/yes/no, suspended in a greyish cloud inside a round bone bowl. Yes: lovely. No: too lonely. Yes. The world that we think we see is only our best guess. This must have been his shack, collapsed now, where he’d—what? Come sometimes and sit? Hepaticas wrenched up by sun, brown tufts of hairbrush grass, the toppled stove, the wild leeks so glossy they look wet, the soft log frilled with mushrooms. You could get waylaid here, or slip amazed into your tangled head. You could just not come back.

Improvisation on a First Line by Yeats From Hound Voice Because we love bare hills and stunted trees we head north when we can, past taiga, tundra, rocky shoreline, ice. Where does it come from, this sparse taste of ours? How long did we roam this hardscape, learning by heart all that we used to know: turn skin fur side in, partner with wolves, eat fat, hate waste, carve spirit, respect the snow, build and guard flame? 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.

Plasticene Suite

1. Rock-like Object on Beach The Paleocene the Eocene the Miocene the Pleistocene and now we’re here: the Plasticene. Look, a rock made of sand and one of lime, and one of quartz, and one of what is this? It’s black and striped and slippery, not exactly rock and not not. On the beach at any rate. Petrified oil, with a vein of scarlet, part of a bucket maybe. When we’re gone and the aliens come to puzzle out our fossils: will this be evidence? Of us: of our too-brief history, our cleverness, our thoughtlessness, our sudden death? 2. Faint Hopes You could turn it into oil by cooking it: this has been done. First you’d have to collect it. Also there would be a smell. Some supermarkets have banned it. Also drinking straws. Maybe there will be a tax or other laws. There are microbes that eat it— they’ve been discovered. But the temperature has to be high: no good in the north sea. You can press it into fake lumber but only some kinds. And building blocks, ditto. You can scoop it out of rivers before it gets to the sea. But then what? What do you do with it? With the overwhelming ongoing never-ending outpouring? 3. Foliage “a scrap of black plastic—the defining foliage of the oil age” MARK COCKER, OUR PLACE It sprouts everywhere, this foliage. Up in the trees, like mistletoe, or caught in the marshes or blooming in the ponds like waterlilies, gaudy and frilly, rippling as if alive or washing onto the beaches, neo-seaweed of torn bags, cast wrappers, tangled rope shredded by tide...

Oh Children Oh children, will you grow up in a world without birds? Will there be crickets, where you are? Will there be asters? Clams, at a minimum. Maybe not clams. We know there will be waves. Not much life needed for those. A breeze, a storm, a cyclone. Ripples, as well. Stones. Stones are consoling. There will be sunsets, as long as there is dust. There will be dust. Oh children, will you grow up in a world without songs? Without pines, without mosses? Will you spend your life in a cave, a sealed cave with an oxygen line, until there’s a power failure? Will your eyes blank out like the eggwhite eyes of sunless fish? In there, what will you wish for? Oh children, will you grow up in a world without ice? Without mice, without lichens? Oh children, will you grow up?

The body, once your accomplice, is now your trap.