Sorry, future.

I hope you know I was kidding about that. As if there'd be a future. As if I'd apologize to it. As if as if as if.

I wrote several blurbs today. All for the same book. I erased all but two, and those two are really the same one aimed a bit differently. I sent one. I hope the publisher and the poet like it. I hope after it is on the cover of the book, or on the internet, somebody will read it and it will convince them to read the poems. So, see, that's a serious sort of situation. How important!

Writing a blurb is still writing. It's reading and writing. It's a review condensed but also probably more personal. It takes as long to think about a book and just write a few sentences as it does to think about a book and write several paragraphs. Probably it takes even more time, because of the constraints of the genre, like, you can't write a blurb that is longer than what will fit on the back of the book, and anyway nobody wants to read you going on and on when they could just read the book itself, and anyway they probably didn't recognize your name in the first place. You've done nothing for anyone. Well, you tried. And anyway, you really liked the book. Love would not be too strong a word. You are always falling in love with books. So it's good sometimes to have an occasion to express it.

Sorry, future, about my tendency to simply gush. But when all the waters of the earth dry up, and the only moisture left in the universe is trapped in the center of stars, or maybe there's a little left in a few moons or the rings of Saturn, perhaps we'll all feel more kindly toward gushing and wonder why so much of the time we absurdly wasted in sere pronouncements of stingy context and name-checking or in saying nothing at all, withholding all kinds of droplets that could have been condensed on a receptively slick, cool surface. Love is so wet! Isn't it refreshing?