Margaret Atwood

Starspangled cowboy sauntering out of the almost- silly West, on your face a porcelain grin, tugging a papier-mâché cactus on wheels behind you with a string, you are innocent as a bathtub full of bullets. Your righteous eyes, your laconic trigger-fingers people the streets with villains: as you move, the air in front of you blossoms with targets and you leave behind you a heroic trail of desolation: beer bottles slaughtered by the side of the road, bird- skulls bleaching in the sunset. I ought to be watching from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront when the shooting starts, hands clasped in admiration, but I am elsewhere. Then what about me what about the I confronting you on that border, you are always trying to cross? I am the horizon you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso I am also what surrounds you: my brain scattered with your tincans, bones, empty shells, the litter of your invasions. I am the space you desecrate as you pass through.

In that country the animals have the faces of people: the ceremonial cats possessing the streets the fox run politely to earth, the huntsmen standing around him, fixed in their tapestry of manners the bull, embroidered with blood and given an elegant death, trumpets, his name stamped on him, heraldic brand because (when he rolled on the sand, sword in his heart, the teeth in his blue mouth were human) he is really a man even the wolves, holding resonant conversations in their forests thickened with legend. In this country the animals have the faces of animals. Their eyes flash once in car headlights and are gone. Their deaths are not elegant. They have the faces of no-one.