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When I was working on
this-- this book sort of

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centers around the
life of two people.

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One is Egon Schiele, the
Austro-Hungarian painter who

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lived during World War I,
and the language philosopher,

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Austrian philosopher,
Ludwig Wittgenstein,

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and they were contemporary.

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Centers around both of these
men, although it's not really

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like a biography.

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When I was working on
this book in Tucson,

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I'd started it when I was
living in Central Europe,

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but I got sort of stuck.

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I didn't quite know what to
do with all of the material

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that I had written, and there
was a kind of break in that,

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and I began writing something
else, which became actually

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the second book that I wrote.

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I sort of wrote
them simultaneously.

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When one wasn't working, I
would go to the other one,

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and sort of back and
forth, and that's

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why they sort of came out
really, really quickly

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together, close together.

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Quickly together.

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Quickly.

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A lot.

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Quite a bit.

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This section is called
"The Room of Hatchets,

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the City of Sleep."

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A long walk out into the wheat,
and the scarecrow flaps up

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into starlings.

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Some children carry ripe oranges
to the abandoned airplane

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hangar, through the
Hornet's Nest Gully,

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around a little trampled
path along the side,

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hand the paper bag in and slip
around the peeled back hunk

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of aluminum hanger wall.

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Listen when they open
each other with laughter,

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it loosens the paint and
spills into your neck.

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A little girl has words
bigger than her body, bigger.

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Here the second boy
is speaking, as if

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in a missive from the orchard
wash basin but without paper.

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Will you pull this off and draw
what the mirror returns to you?

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Upstairs, out of the
basement, the dog

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lunging after angry
birds in the wind.

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Wally's diction is
precise, almost impossible.

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Require something of
me, command me to stay.

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Once, she said
simply, more yellow,

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and Egon walked into the
garden as if for a cigarette.

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Photographing myself endlessly,
in keeling German to strangers

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or alone on trains.

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The woman with the mole's
eyes holds up her arm

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like the number 4, and her
red dress is a quilt on fire.

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This painting scores my sleep.

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School girls sleeping, school
boys sleeping and stemmed.

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I will dream you, draw you.

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Susan had six screens of shade
and brown light, almost yellow.

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A tiny lever in your
wrist, a perfect spine,

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just invisible voices,
and napping, I dream back

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Vienna.

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The third train
station to tiny Tulln,

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river grass, bright,
wet sunlight.

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The nude women from the severed
triptych with their backs

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turned, their hair pinned up.

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Under the photograph
of the cut sketch

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it reads: present
whereabouts unknown.

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