They made a circle out of sage and gold

It is my birthday. I am forty years old, which makes me the age of a character in an unpublished novel when their life changes all ways for the better, which I would enjoy as an omen: a second plague celebration was definitely not on the docket last year. I woke to a card from my godmother and a package from selkie and a book from my parents. With any luck this wandering cloud-slipping sun will hold long enough for us to get to the sea, as I have been promised. I am still here and especially these days that should count for something.

Feel them ebb and flowing like a sky

My niece had carefully kept the secret of my birthday plans which spatch had arranged with my mother and my mother with her friend who lives by the sea: an outing to Point of Pines in Revere. My mother drove, my brother called shotgun, Rob and I jammed ourselves into the back seat with my niece who purred most enthusiastically to wish me a happy birthday. We ate our assortment of fried shrimp and clams and roast beef sandwiches from Kelly's at the picnic bench in the back yard of my mother's friend who has known me and my brother since we were part of the same play group as her children. It was her house where I received my idiosyncratic exposure to children's cartoons of the '80's on the days when she picked me up after school because both of my parents worked too late to. Now she has a house with a beach at the end of the street, decorative lobster buoys hanging on the gate and an antique Singer treadle machine for a mail table and a stained-glass window full of sun and waves at the turn of the stairs. My brother took her silky-eared, caramel-colored dog to run on the beach with my niece, my mother and her friend stayed behind to catch up in the late chasing sunlight, and Rob and I made straight for the sea. All photos taken by him unless specified otherwise.

( Remote and dark, you orchestrate the tide. )

I do not often get to observe my birthday as a family affair on the day. My niece had effectively appointed herself master of ceremonies; we got home and she kept me out of the kitchen until it was time for her to lead me to the table with my eyes closed, cautioning me not to look even when an unseen vase of flowers brushed my face as I sat down. She had helped decorate the cake—almond flour with marzipan, marmalade, and slices of mandarin orange—with a rather abstract cat's face in green icing and with the small polymer clay animals that were a treasured staple of birthdays in my childhood. They hold the candles; they were presents from my god-aunt who is no longer alive; I was given one every year until I was twelve. The little pink-nosed mouse with a wedge of yellow cheese is the oldest. The green-eyed Siamese cat in a tangle of blue and pink yarn was perhaps my favorite, closely competing with the sable-black seal with a red-tailed fish in its mouth. The white and silver dragon was to grow on. I hadn't seen any of them in decades. I am now in possession of far more presents than I was expecting from this straitened year, including Frank Ormsby's Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems (2015), Desperate Journalist's Maximum Sorrow! (2021) which my brother turned out to have ordered from the UK, and an IOU from my father for the Gorey-illustrated The War of the Worlds (1898). I must also give a special shout-out to Katherine Kincaid's Beloved Bondage (1993), which I read in a friend's dorm room at grad school because he had been given it as a gag gift: I recall it as basically original character m/f for I, Claudius, which, you know, I stocked far worse ideas in the romance section of Waldenbooks. My mother regretted not being able to send me home with a balloon this year for the cats. I told her it was all right. I had a wonderful birthday. I really did. I did not always imagine I would make it this far. I hope I can hold on to wanting to keep going.