I've spent the morning--I was going to say "being deliciously anal," but that seems a poor choice of words. Anyway, futzing over every poem, every word, every comma of See How We Almost Fly before emailing the complete manuscript to the publisher. I made big last-minute changes--pulled some poems out, restored others--and small ones, changing line breaks and trimming excess words. I love the version I have now, and doing this process has given me peace around my question, "Why did it have to take eight years?"

I've revisited the poems I wrote after visiting Alaska in 2002; I was so stimulated by what i saw and felt there that I came back and wrote a slew of poems. I wrestled with one, about pole-fishing for salmon on Kenai Peninsula at 10 p.m. near Summer Solstice--it was still quite light out, a kind of bright twilight--anyway I must have rewritten that poem 500 times. Today I finally got it right.

And others, the Moose poem...I regret that the Caribou one is lost to history, a casualty of my stolen laptop.

Anyway, it's all good, and it's DONE, and in the process of doing it I also made changes to Love Shack, so it's all in a days' work...now I'm going to go outside into this glorious day and hike and swim and reathe.