The Circle Game Quotes

“and when we spoke /
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”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“Camera man
how can I love your glass eye?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“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.)”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“There is no centre;
the centres
travel with us unseen
like our shadows
on a day when there is no sun”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“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”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“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”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“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”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“I want the circle
broken.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“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.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems

“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”
― Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game: Poems