Margaret Atwood

The text for this painting is from a poem by Margaret Atwood. Here is the original.

A Place: Fragments

i
Here on the rim, cringing
under the cracked whip of winter
we live
in houses of ice,
but not because we want to:
in order to survive
we make what we can and have to
with what we have.

ii

Old woman I visited once
out of my way
in a little-visited province:

she had a neat
house, a clean parlour
though obsolete and poor:

a cushion with a fringe;
glass animals arranged
across the mantlepiece
(a swan, a horse, a bull);
a mirror;
a teacup sent from Scotland;
several heraldic spoons;
a lamp; and in the centre
of the table, a paperweight:
hollow glass globe
filled with water, and
a house, a man, a snowstorm.
The room was as
dustless as possible
and free of spiders.

I
stood in the door-way,
at the fulcrum where

this trivial but
stringent inner order
held its delicate balance
with the random scattering or
clogged merging of
things: ditch by the road; dried
reeds in the wind; flat
wet bush, grey sky
sweeping away outside.