April Twilights

Tonight this small volume of poems is comforting me. This small book, published in 1923 I found for five dollars yesterday in my favorite used bookstore and because it was old, yellow, because on page fifty three there's a postcard from the Crosby Hotel in New Mexico, I brought the book home. I brought the book home because it was her.

What is comforting is it could have been anyone, one reads the first page where Willa Cather thanks the editors who have published her poems and you know it is her first book b/c she thanks them in a way that is new and childlike. It brings me peace, that voice; the voice before it is a master’s voice before it Willa Cather’s voice telling us stories, it was a new voice.

I struggle so much to be a master, in so many things. Tonight I am reading a book before it is a book. I am looking at the way the poems shuffled and re shuffled themselves, how a woman began and I know this beginning. I am a master of this beginning, laying the manuscript out, telling it what I believe. Tonight it answers. Begin.

All books before they are books say one simple word.