January, Dear January

It's been a while since a real update here at Intagliod: blog named after the unbelievably joyous arrival of my first book.

In that time, this has been a place to go with quiet wishes, various sadnesses, celebrations, pretty finds to share in word and image and companionship of the imaginary kind. If anyone was reading along, I'd no way of knowing, but I could imagine someone was and it was companionship to me when I moved to new cities and new selves and had no friends for a time or really, no friends close-by. Here was a place to hang my hope-hat, my poncho of longings. Here was a magical wardrobe to crawl through and build my own globe: mosaiced with the loveliest writing or prettiest thing I saw that day, a stockpot of sensory-finds and sundry emotions and friendship, if only my own, to talk me through some super-dark days.

Then I met A Someone and that Someone has made life feel even richer, but has filled it too, with a little house in the country, our crew of kitties and frogs and garden and deer, raccoons, possum, birds demanding their feeders stay filled, Christmas trees that stay alive by being planted in the yard, a yard that remembers what we give and an us that stays in one place long enough to reap what we sow. It was a busier breathing I began and I love it, but it keeps me often, from returning here.

I wanted to sum up the newnesses though. The kitties that grew old and died within a span of a few short months. The man who helped me grieve and bury them. The decision to foster a trio of orphan kittens and to fail at one of those fosters, thus bringing us our little tuxedo  cat to keep our one year old Cricket company. Then Clementine, because like me she'd waited too long for a keeping-place. The house revitalized with three kitties again, no one yet two. The stampedes that fill our days. The joy of it all. The frog rescues every spring, the little pond that grows the tadpole to pollywog and pollywog to frog and tree frog. Their perfectly articulated miniature selves. The herb garden, tire planters that I took from an abandoned house just as they were to be hauled away. A sixties trend to cut truck tires into floral planters and paint them bright colors and the way that I took that old project, labored over by other older hands and slapped on a new coat of paint, planted some mums at its core and made the house a little more our own with their colorful welcome at the driveway's end.  And beyond that driveway, south, south, south from here, my adored sister has given us a niece and a nephew that fill me with more love than  I thought possible.  Life is good just now and as I know just how tentative our "just nows" are, i want to track that here, share that you, whoever you are, if only really me again at another time when I need to remember how good it all got again after it had at times, been so bad.

The ring. At long last and my first. A Someone became The Someone and before this year ends, I will be married. There is so much celebrating to be done and I am savoring it all. And now the next books: a chapbook called Aloha Vaudeville Doll that will be published by Dancing Girl Press in summer of this year and finally, my collection of poems: The Rub, won a prize and will be out in early 2014 by Elixir Press. I can hardly believe it all.

Building of Unseen Cats
       

When I woke up, it was the middle of the night and
my building was on fire. The hallway was not filled
with smoke, and then quickly it was. I rescued a few
older men from their bathtubs, a few babies from
their cribs. Outside, the air was filled with hair.
Everyone but me was holding a plastic cage with a
cat in it. We weren't supposed to have cats in my
building, but there they all were, an invisible nation
suddenly uncurtained into a blinding and brutal
world. Everyone looked at me with a face that said
let's never speak o f this. Let's not look directly at what
is meant to be loved in secret. Let's, for example,
imagine the sea is always, constantly, and forever
spilling toward us, that our screaming building is
something worth escaping.

Zachary Schmoburg