A little rain fell yesterday--not nearly as much as the garden needs, but enough to prevent me from hauling firewood after I'd finished up my desk chores for the day. There is nothing good about handling wet logs. But I did get the house cleaned, and I did work my way through a hundred pages of editing, so stuff was accomplished.

Today: another giant editing push, another round of firewood hauling. That's the kind of week this will be.

A wind-breath, thick and damp, fumbles at the open windows. In the semi-darkness a Carolina wren solos above a cricket-drone continuo. Chuckie crunches up some chow in the kitchen.

Yesterday evening I got notice that the Academy of American Poets has posted three of my poems on its website. All are from previously published books; if you're one of this blog's eight regular readers, you've probably seen them before. But the fact is: this is the first time that a major national poetry clearinghouse has ever taken notice of my work.

I know the state laureateship was the trigger for the invitation, a blip on the po-biz radar that suddenly made me visible. I'm pleased, of course, and also gratified--even this small bit of national recognition feels like candy. But at age 61, I'm also bemused. I've been writing intensely for 30 years, and over the decades the audience for my work has increased from nonexistent to small. It's easy, and obvious, to carp about invisibility, to yearn for fame. But invisibility is also extremely cozy. And I'm not, in retrospect, at all sorry to have spent so many years under a blanket, flashlight in hand, writing and writing and writing.