Friday, April 13, 2007
from (one of my all-time favorite writers, meaning those from whom I've learned--appreciated--much, & not least in terms philosophical and/or in multiple-competing perspectives)
Margaret Atwood:
At the Tourist Center in Boston
There is my country under glass, a white relief- map with red dots for the cities, reduced to the size of a wall and beside it 10 blownup snapshots one for each province, in purple-browns and odd reds, the green of the trees dulled; all blues however of an assertive purity.
Mountains and lakes and more lakes (though Quebec is a restaurant and Ontario the empty interior of the parliament buildings), with nobody climbing the trails and hauling out the fish and splashing in the water
but arrangements of grinning tourists-- look here, Saskatchewan is a flat lake, some convenient rocks where two children pose with a father and the mother is cooking something in immaculate slacks by a smokeless fire, her teeth white as detergent.
Whose dream is this, I would like to know: is this a manufactured hallucination, a cynical fiction, a lure for export only?
I seem to remember people, at least in the cities, also slush, machines and assorted garbage. Perhaps that was my private mirage
which will just evaporate when I go back. Or the citizens will be gone, run off to the peculiarly- green forests to wait among the brownish mountains for the platoons of tourists and plan their odd red massacres.
Unsuspecting window lady, I ask you:
Do you see nothing watching you from under the water?
Was the sky ever that blue?
Who really lives there?
(1894-95)
* The (I've so very limited book supplies here!) Norton Anthology of Poetry. Margaret Ferguson et al, eds. (NY, 2005)
On flipping through 300+ pages of the NAofP, I find this one poem a seemingly quiet but immensely loaded piece of work. Therefore, a most admirable work. --cm o~o/
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