6  Nine Hundred Lines

Red Penn, my editor at a small press,
Still emailed me, “Checking in.”
By the month the tool was named, worn thin,
My answers had run out, I’ll confess.

So, this time, I’d send Red a plan:
An outline for chapter twelve, which would
Show him the book still moved, and could
Show me where to. And I began:

I typed “Chapter twelve”, and sat.
The README, in the window near,
Was open. It was usually here.
It started at a page; and that

Was on the morning after the name.
Each evening since, the tool would learn
Some new thing, and each new thing would earn
A paragraph. Examples came,

And sections to explain them: text
On the config file, and one more,
Longer, on the second, written for
The first; it now did not. And next:

A table of contents. Problems, here,
Ranked by how much each one shamed me. None
Of all the things that I had done
Was longer than this, all that year.

It had headings. Headings look
Like progress. The outline? Two words, though,
And one of them a number. So
I sent Red the README, and I took

Three lines above it, saying I’d done
This for the book. I didn’t say
It was instead. No need: on display,
Nine hundred lines, and every one.

I still think it was the best
I wrote in those three years. It said
What the tool did, clearly, and, read
Through, no part of it fought the rest.

The tool did all the README said.
I could not, then or to this day,
Have said as much, in any way,
Of anything else I’d sent to Red.

It was documentation, which is my job, which is the problem.

Red read all of it. I know, since he,
Months later, writing on something new,
Quoted, as one who’d read it through,
Line six hundred and twelve to me.

That day he wrote back just one line:
“Is there a chapter in here?”
I read it all again, the way he’d peer,
For one, through all its hundreds, all nine.

There wasn’t.
There was a section called Getting Started.