City of Glass / New York Trilogy Part I

by Autumn McClintock

In the story the writer is mistaken for a detective,
and he becomes the detective who has the name
of the author, and the author is not a detective
but a man obsessed with the story of Don Quixote.

So the writer becomes the detective who has the name
Paul Auster, though at the time he doesn't know
the real Auster's a man obsessed with the story of Don Quixote
who was wild in his own right—chased whores and the wind.

The reader knows Paul Auster, the author, but she doesn't know
just what the hell he wants with her, waltzing around in his own novel
like a wild man, chasing whores and the wind.
What the reader knows is nothing about New York City—

how it wants her, wants to waltz her around the novel.
It's a shame she's a dense and lonely reader,
and all she knows is reading and nothing of New York City
but the fact that its streets are an easy and screaming grid.

It's a shame she's a dense and lonely reader,
not a sweaty madman or a sharp deducing eye
that could see the screaming streets as a map, their grid
a puzzle broken down to avenues like clues for the fake detective

who's a sweaty madman by the end, a sharpened, deducing eye
that the author fashioned, though the author is not a detective
but a puzzle, unhinged to fake-out the clueless writer/detective
who, in the story, is mistaken.  He's no writer, just some wild detective.