The Door

Another visit to the Oracle

Questioning the dead
Go to the mouth of a cave,

dig a trench, slit the throat

of an animal, pour out the blood.

Or sit in a chair

with others, at a round table

in a darkened room.

Close your eyes, hold hands.

These techniques might be called

the heroic and the mezzotint.

We aren’t sure we believe in either,

or in the dead, when they do appear,

smelling like damp hair,

flickering like faulty toasters,

rustling their tissue paper

faces, their sibilants, their fissures,

trailing their fraudulent gauze.

Their voices are dry as lentils

falling into a glass jar.

Why can’t they speak up clearly

instead of mumbling about keys and numbers,

and stairs, they mention stairs . . .

Why do we keep pestering them?

Why do we insist they love us?

What did we want to ask them

anyway? Nothing they wish to tell.

Or stand by a well or pool

and drop in a pebble.

The sound you hear is the question

you should have asked.

Also the answer.

Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale (now a Hulu series) her novels include The Blind Assassin (winner of the Booker Prize), Alias Grace (winner of the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy), The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Penelopiad, The Heart Goes Last, and Hag-Seed, a novel revisitation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, for the Hogarth Shakespeare Project

It’s dark in there.
You confide yourself to the darkness.
You step in.
The door swings closed.

nonetheless you are wakeful.
The door swings open:
O god of hinges,
god of long voyages,

The door swings closed.
The dog has died.
This happened before.
You got another;
not this time though

The door swings open:
it’s dark in there,
with many steps going down

Is there a secret?
The door swings closed

The door swings open,
you look in:
why does this keep happening now