Margaret Atwood(b. 1939)
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