Margaret Atwood - Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer lyrics

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! 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

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
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

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 bent
Pin besides he thought in that country
Only the worms were biting
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

Things refused to name themselves refused
To let him name them

The wolves hunted outside

On his beaches, his clearings
By the surf of undergrowth 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