Backdropp Addresses Cowboy
Backdropp Addresses Cowboy - meaning Summary
Cowboy as Invasive Spectacle
The poem addresses an exaggerated American cowboy figure as a theatrical, destructive invader. The speaker depicts him as both innocent and violent — a papier-mâché spectacle leaving a wake of bottles, skulls and emptiness. Rather than admire, the speaker refuses passive witness and asserts themselves as the horizon and surrounding space the cowboy cannot seize. The poem reframes the cowboy’s swagger as cultural desecration of the speaker’s mental and physical landscape.
Read Complete AnalysesStarspangled cowboy sauntering out of the almost- silly West, on your face a porcelain grin, tugging a papier-mache 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.
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