As predicted, I couldn't keep my hands off the manuscript yesterday morning, but eventually I did let it lie, and chugged out to the grocery store, and chugged back to clean the refrigerator, and otherwise tumbled back into my workaday life.

Still, it stays in my mind. I've already stripped it down by 10 pages, and several more poems may also go, or at least be radically revised for this context.

But it exists. It has a character, and it moves through its world.

* * *

Today I'll be back to editing other people's books, and working on Frost Place stuff, and reading Donne. T and I have a dinner invitation tonight, so later we'll walk out into the rain to spend a few hours with friends. 

The rain will keep raining. My poems will keep clanking around in my head.

In the meantime, yesterday's harvest: tender lettuce, first basil, a handful of prize-worthy red spring onions--