Looking for the Magic

“My women suffer because most of the women I talk to seem to have suffered.”

Habitation
by Margaret Atwood, 1970

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire