Variations on a Theme

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

fish hook
an open eye


Variations on the word love
Margaret Atwood

This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.

Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
This word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliff-side. You can
hold on or let go.

And I, oh I hold on.



Variations on a Lovesong
After Ted Hughes

Love is a carnivore
I love you and you love me
I want to print you into my bones
Your caresses to be the hooks of a castaway
Safe and Sure forever and ever
My eyes want nothing to get away
My looks nailing down your hands your wrist your elbows
Your smiles the garrets of a fairy place
Where the real world would never come
My smiles spider bites
So you would lie still till I felt hungry
Your words occupying armies
This is what I want
Your promises to be the surgeon's gag
My promises taking the top off your skull
I would get a brooch made of it
Your vows pulling out all my sinews
I want you to show me how to make a love-knot
At the back of my secret drawer
Our heads falling apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop
In our entwined sleep we exchange arms and legs
In our dreams our brains take each other hostage
In the morning we wear each other's face
This is how I know I love you



Variations on the word Sleep
Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.



We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack
(Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach)
After myself

To be in love again
to live all the poetry in the world
the exultation, the depths, the intoxicating scents
to stand on a railway station quay
waiting for the train to come
thinking how I stood there
once and once again
and now this once more
threescore and ten years later
younger now than I was before
indestructable and strong
all my scars kissed to heal

So now I am fixed in a formulated phrase, pinned on the wall. It is worth it, after all/ After the sunsets and dooryards and the sprinkled streets/ After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—/And this, and so much more—/ It is possible to say just what I mean/As if a magic lantern throws the nerves in patterns on a screen:/ It has been worth while/ If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,/ And turning toward the window, should say:/ ‘That is it,/ That is exactly what I meant’.


- Sunday 17 January 2010