Margaret Atwood, 1939-, Canadian novelist and poet, born in Ottawa. Her

poems, like her novels, are characterised by sharp, vivid language and images,

and an unsparing, angry or sardonic analysis of power relationships between

men and women.

Orpheus (1)

You walked in front of me,

pulling me back out

to the green light that had once

grown fangs and killed me.

I was obedient, but

numb, like an arm

gone to sleep; the return

to time was not my choice.

By then I was used to silence.

Though something stretched between us

like a whisper, like a rope:

my former name,

drawn tight.

You had your old leash

with you, love you might call it,

and your flesh voice.

Before your eyes you held steady

the image of what you wanted

me to become: living again.

It was this hope of yours that kept me following.

I was your hallucination, listening

and floral, and you were singing me:

already new skin was forming on me

within the luminous misty shroud

of my other body; already

there was dirt on my hands and I was thirsty.

I could see only the outline

of your head and shoulders,

black against the cave mouth,

and so could not see your face

at all, when you turned

and called to me because you had

already lost me. The last

I saw of you was a dark oval.

Though I knew how this failure

would hurt you, I had to

fold like a gray moth and let go.

You could not believe I was more than your echo.

Eurydice

He is here, come down to look for you.

It is the song that calls you back,

a song of joy and suffering

equally: a promise:

that things will be different up there

than they were last time.

You would rather have gone on feeling nothing,

emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace

of the deepest sea, which is easier

than the noise and flesh of the surface.

You are used to these blanched dim corridors,

you are used to the king

who passes you without speaking.

The other one is different

and you almost remember him.

He says he is singing to you

because he loves you,

not as you are now,

so chilled and minimal: moving and still

both, like a white curtain blowing

in the draft from a half-opened window

beside a chair on which nobody sits.

He wants you to be what he calls real.

He wants you to stop light.

He wants to feel himself thickening

like a treetrunk or a haunch

and see blood on his eyelids

when he closes them, and the sun beating.

This love of his is not something

he can do if you aren't there,

but what you knew suddenly as you left your body

cooling and whitening on the lawn

was that you love him anywhere,

even in this land of no memory,

even in this domain of hunger.

You hold love in your hand, a red seed

you had forgotten you were holding.

He has come almost too far.

He cannot believe without seeing,

and it's dark here.

Go back, you whisper,

but he wants to be fed again

by you. O handful of gauze, little

bandage, handful of cold

air, it is not through him

you will get your freedom.

Orpheus (2)

Whether he will go on singing

or not, knowing what he knows

of the horror of this world:

He was not wandering among meadows

all this time. He was down there

among the mouthless ones, among

those with no fingers, those

whose names are forbidden,

those washed up eaten into

among the gray stones

of the shore where nobody goes

through fear. Those with silence:

He has been trying to sing

love into existence again

and he has failed.

Yet he will continue

to sing, in the stadium

crowded with the already dead

who raise their eyeless faces

to listen to him; while the reel flowers

grow up and splatter open

against the walls.

They have cut off both his hands

and soon they will tear

his head from his body in one burst

of furious refusal.

He foresees this. Yet he will go on

singing, and in praise.

To sing is either praise

or defiance. Praise is defiance.