When I was working on this-- this book sort of
centers around the life of two people.
One is Egon Schiele, the Austro-Hungarian painter who
lived during World War I, and the language philosopher,
Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
and they were contemporary.
Centers around both of these men, although it's not really
like a biography.
When I was working on this book in Tucson,
I'd started it when I was living in Central Europe,
but I got sort of stuck.
I didn't quite know what to do with all of the material
that I had written, and there was a kind of break in that,
and I began writing something else, which became actually
the second book that I wrote.
I sort of wrote them simultaneously.
When one wasn't working, I would go to the other one,
and sort of back and forth, and that's
why they sort of came out really, really quickly
together, close together.
Quickly together.
Quickly.
A lot.
Quite a bit.
This section is called "The Room of Hatchets,
the City of Sleep."
A long walk out into the wheat, and the scarecrow flaps up
into starlings.
Some children carry ripe oranges to the abandoned airplane
hangar, through the Hornet's Nest Gully,
around a little trampled path along the side,
hand the paper bag in and slip around the peeled back hunk
of aluminum hanger wall.
Listen when they open each other with laughter,
it loosens the paint and spills into your neck.
A little girl has words bigger than her body, bigger.
Here the second boy is speaking, as if
in a missive from the orchard wash basin but without paper.
Will you pull this off and draw what the mirror returns to you?
Upstairs, out of the basement, the dog
lunging after angry birds in the wind.
Wally's diction is precise, almost impossible.
Require something of me, command me to stay.
Once, she said simply, more yellow,
and Egon walked into the garden as if for a cigarette.
Photographing myself endlessly, in keeling German to strangers
or alone on trains.
The woman with the mole's eyes holds up her arm
like the number 4, and her red dress is a quilt on fire.
This painting scores my sleep.
School girls sleeping, school boys sleeping and stemmed.
I will dream you, draw you.
Susan had six screens of shade and brown light, almost yellow.
A tiny lever in your wrist, a perfect spine,
just invisible voices, and napping, I dream back
Vienna.
The third train station to tiny Tulln,
river grass, bright, wet sunlight.
The nude women from the severed triptych with their backs
turned, their hair pinned up.
Under the photograph of the cut sketch
it reads: present whereabouts unknown.