Something was stopping my parents' garage door closing, so I had a poke about to find out why. This is what came down and, as it did, my mind went to the “bereft elaboration” of the poem in Vincent O’Sullivan’s Seeing You Asked (1998). “It is one thing”, the poem says, to tell a child that birds “have their reasons”. It’s quite another, seeing the “cracked spilled work of instinct” to know that this is all, for them and for us, a mystery, the nest a message “franked / from places we do not understand, but fear.” “The child”, the poem ends, “consoles the cup of woven air.”