So there's a part of that section
that I just read where I wanted to figure out--
it didn't seem like it sort of belonged in that book,
and I wanted to see what would happen if I sort of took
a left turn and tried to write a different book out of that, out
of a little tiny stands in one book,
and, poof, this came out, just like that.
I mean, I didn't know it at the time.
You never really know, or maybe you do
and maybe I just don't, what you're doing
or where a new book will sort of come out.
But there was just a very little moment where the children sort
of go back in this old sort of aluminum airplane hangar,
and I wanted to see what would happen
if a book happened in there and left
all this Austro-Hungarian business behind.
So that's sort of why they sort of happened at the same time
in this book.
It's sort of much more--
it's much more of this book.
This is one section called "Of Bird, String,
and Dragging Fables."
In the apple orchard dragged--
well, somebody did.
Thick boot steps in the bee mud, a dog dead, and carefully
scooped away Sunday's grassy cuttings
and left the animal to beetles.
Carefully scooped lumps of grass back over,
and it was perfect almost, until my brother, sneaking
to meet a girl, heard the raccoons grunting like seals,
pawing the dog's stiff leg out.
My brother, with a white BIC lighter.
Raccoons scatter.
Autumn, and count until forever, and you're done.
Couldn't you see the ending before it unraveled you?
Would you mind lying down first?
Did you come by foot over the new bridge?
Here with a poem becomes ladders again.
The little girl returned with candy and a
"nearly" on her lips.
Dirty holdout, the bank robbers' melody in the evening shower
upstairs seeps through with the hump
of the ceiling fan like the telephone
into the fury of the vacuum.
Anna steals out of bed, needs earliness, hours of it,
to reel undarkening landscapes into her old Holga camera.
Railroad bridge, garbled depot, plasma bank
on South Fourth Avenue.
This night, someone special will wander drunk
to a crushed payphone, sink the quarter into the gummed slot,
and have the conversation anyway.
You should really apologize and bring those dreams
into the diner.
Well, with you, pocket mouse, but shh, shh, exactly so.
Sleep it, open.
Exactly so.
The thieves had lifted themselves out
of the tunnel with such swiftness.
They rinsed their faces and hands in the subway washroom,
paused for the clicking turnstile
to click back, and assure a crowded entry just as the train
doors open, bustling out.
Your soldier hangs his dark uniform neatly
in the washroom stall and re-enters
the city in street clothes.
If it's hung carefully enough, somebody
will wear it out and disappear against you
as you re-appeared yourself as somebody somewhere
else, the same but differently in finish.
Cities are for breaking you into several people at once.
Swamps, however, have white egrets, noise enough
to pull the eyes out of your head.
If drizzle, then mosquitoes.
Home almost, at least where words cut your lip,
and I spoke you together and then back apart.
A fear of all basements and attics,
fear of triplets and twins, fear of trees that lean badly
onto power lines or houses, a fear of the 16th hour
and flawless numbers of uncles, heavy with booze,
and the hasty games of cousins.
Fear of the telegram and the wires of the doorbell.
In the swimming pool light, the boy who freed the moth
plods back up the stairs, does a little jig in the mirror,
and flops into bed.
He has cats and he has sisters, and he confuses
on purpose their names.
The machines, the machines break down
in a street sweeping huff in the city
as its imperial way with us.