Some Objects of Wood and Stone -Margaret Atwood i. Totems We went to the park where they kept the wooden people: static, multiple uprooted and trans- planted. Their faces were restored, freshly-painted. In front of them the other wooden people posed for each others' cameras and nearby a new booth sold replicas and souvenirs. One of the people was real. It lay on its back, smashed by a toppling fall or just the enduring of minor winters. Only one of the heads had survived intact, and it was also beginning to decay but there was a life in the progressing of old wood back to the earth, obliteration that the clear-hewn standing figures lacked. As for us, perennial watchers, tourists of another kind there is nothing for us to worship; no pictures of ourselves, no blue- sky summer fetishes, no postcards we can either buy, or smiling be. There are few totems that remain living for us. Though in passing, through glass we notice dead trees in the seared meadows dead roots bleaching in the swamps. ii Pebbles Talking was difficult. Instead we gathered coloured pebbles from the places on the beach where they occurred. They were sea-smootheed, sea-completed. They enclosed what they intended to mean in shapes as random and necessary as the shapes of words. and when finally we spoke the sounds of our voices fell into the air      single and solid and rounded and reallly there and then dulled, and then like sounds gone,      a fistful of gathered pebbles there was no point in taking home, dropped on a beachful of other coloured pebbles
			and when we turned to go a flock of small birds flew scattered by the fright of our sudden moving and disappeared: hard sea pebbles thrown solid for an instant against the sky flight of words iii Carved Animals The small carved animal is passed from hand to hand around the circle until the stone grows warm touching, the hands do not know the form of animal which was made or the true form of stone uncovered and the hands, the fingers the hidden small bones of the hands bend to hold the shape, shape themselves, grow cold with the stone's cold, grow also animal, exchange until the skin wonders if stone is human in the darkenss later and even when the animal has gone, they keep the image of that inner shape hands holding warm hands holding the half-formed air