I'm likely to be incommunicado for a few days: poetry retreats and internet service don't always overlap. But the birds will be migrating, and the sea will be lapping at the stones, and I will be reading Whitman and playing backup fiddle leads. And perhaps, in the interstices, I will be able to spend some time with my western Pennsylvania poems and begin to glimpse an overarching organization beyond simple chronological order. I have a sense that some sort of landscape structure is also necessary--perhaps a series of such sections, each with an internal chronology. The considerations of book structure give me a great deal of creative pleasure, yet they require a state of mind that is very different from writing and revision. I discovered Same Old Story during a slow, empty afternoon by the sea. I hope that I'll find Chestnut Ridge on another such day.