Mobiles

Your stories are marvels of precision. 
Like Calder's mobiles, they move in perfect balance on the slightest updraft. 
How do you put it all together with beginning, middle, end, the rising action and resolution (just like they taught in school)?

My stories are ramshackle; they lurch along in old sweaters with missing buttons, drinking from mismatched cups and saucers. They mutter; yours crow.

Mine hide behind dark glasses and long bangs 
while yours step out into the glare of flashbulbs, 
square their shoulders and accept the Big Prize 
with the Foreign-Sounding Name never before given 
to Anyone So Young.

There is no use to rallying round me and saying
"The short story is much harder to pull off," 
or buying me drinks with shoulder-pounding cheer. 
The agent who called me from New York wanted a novel.
"Short fiction is all I've got," I said.
"You have to write a novel," he said. 
I'd rather tour the world of mobiles. I'd like to go from Gdansk to County Clair, Majorca to Mount Airy. 
Wherever there are mobiles, I’ll be there, studying their lazy drift. 
Out of my travels a book will come.
It will raise the reader's sight line, inflate his hollow spaces,
and up he’ll drift as light as balsa,
as timeless as the dna we share.


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