The Circle Game QUOTES

1 " 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

3 " 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

5 " I want the circle
broken. "

― Margaret Atwood , The Circle Game

7 " 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

9 " 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

11 " 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

13 " 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