Margaret Atwood

Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer

i
He stood, a point
on a sheet of green paper
proclaiming himself the centre
with no walls, no borders
anywhere; the sky no height
above him, totally un-enclosed
and shouted:
Let me out!

ii
He dug the soil in rows,
imposed himself with shovels
He asserted in to the furrows,
I am not random
The ground
replied with aphorisms:
a tree-sprout,
a nameless weed,
words he couldn't understand.

iii
The house pitched
the plot staked
in the middle of nowhere
At night the mind inside,
in the middle of nowhere
The idea of an animal
patters across the roof
In the darkness the fields
defend themselves with fences in vain:
everything is getting in

iv
By daylight he resisted.
He said, disgusted
with the swamp's clamourings
and the outbursts of rocks.
This is not order
but the absence of order.
He was wrong, the unanswering
forest implied:
It was an ordered absence

v
For many years he fished for a great vision,
dangling the hooks of sown roots
under the surface of the shallow earth.
It was like enticing whales with a bentpin.
Besides he thought in that country
only the worms were biting

vi
If he had known unstructured space is a deluge
and stocked his log house-boat
with all the animals,
even the wolves
he might have floated.
But obstinate he stated,
The land is solid and stamped
watching his foot sink down through stone
up to the knee.

vii
Things refused to name themselves;
refused to let him name them.
The wolves hunted outside.
On his beaches, his clearings,
by the surf of under-growth
breaking at his feet,
he foresaw disintegration
and in the end through eyes
made ragged by his effort,
the tension
between subject and object,
the green vision,
the unnamed whale
invaded!