20 SEPT 05
Guest blogger Max G. gives this morning's news:
The familiar sound of those truck brakes. I go to the screendoor and look out. A burly man in shorts walks up to the house carrying a 21 pound box. Satisfying thump when he sets it onto the wooden porch. "That's the one we're waiting for."
I bring it in, detour by the bathroom to weigh myself with and without the box (just curious). Put it on the table, cut it open. Rough brown packing paper. Then the covers. Thin, stapled spines. World, world.
Kate was still expecting a last proof when Colleen (editor and publisher) wrote to say the finished books had been shipped. K had faith in Colleen, and indeed all the last details were fixed. (Good back and forths between them along the way, the book turning into itself, giving its own instructions that they worked together to translate.)
Out to the studio with one of the chapbooks. I ask, "Can I show you something?" She looks up from her work. She sees it. Oddly, she doesn't take it from me when she walks over, but looks down at it, then touches the cover with her fingertips.
We walk back to the house (I'm still holding the book). She goes to the box, brings out a small stack, weighing their frequency, smiling, excited, maybe afraid. Then, after a lifetime of opening books by other people, she opens one written by her.
A cricket in the furnace duct (good resonating in there) serenades us as we sit at the old table, each reading intently, as if we'd never seen these poems before.
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