Our cave is already tender
stalactites holding syncopated rhythms
years folded between us, wet limestone,
remembering every drop.

Tell me how to excavate these bones
the way spring opens a river
how the marrow gives up its dead
the way a mouth gives up sorrow.

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Short, short, shorts.
Attention spans collapse.
Ice shelves collapse.
Boys collapse.

We.
All.
Fall.
Down.

We named you Wren,
small-bodied, sharp-eyed,
a creature of restless song.

The belly-up, belly-full bird,
calling loud,
perched and quivering,
bobbing up and down, down and up.

We named you Wren.
Not a burden, but a call to arms.

The King of Birds, the trickster,
not nearly as strong as the eagle,
but wiser by far.
Our homely boy, buried headfirst

under your mother’s wing.
Comforted by safety
you flew highest of all.

Male wrens build their nests,
half-formed, waiting
for their mate
to add final touches
to call it a place of their own.

Patient as you are,
your sister does the rest.
You are precise.
She is not.
Your softness, a wonder.

We named you Wren.
And for such a small bird,
what a noise;
loud and insistent,
your song fills the air.

When we found out we were having a son,
an estranged aunt warned,

Oh, the men in our family—

they don’t father their sons well..

As if I would flee the nest,
as if the weight of inheritance
was my cross to bear.
That was her family, not mine.

Years later, in the summer of renewal
I drove to the shoreline,

you in tow. Your mother
playing with spirits in the forest.
Under a giving tree, she meditated.
While we skimmed flat rocks across the sea.
1—2—3—4—5–6-789.

The tears, they flowed.
Remembering the truth
of the fragile boy,
with all the hate I carried.

To forgive myself.
To forgive him.
To forgive.

When we connect,
we don’t soar,
we skitter low, wings tucked,
bouncing proudly across the ground,
like your namesake,
flitting beneath Japanese maples,
pecking at fallen seeds,
dancing around squirrels, gathering leaves.

We serenade each other
in ways only we understand
and in ways we don’t,
or likely ever will.

We named you Wren, my son,
my love, my boy.

My failings live through you,
my triumphs, my joy.

In the silence between us,
where words often fail,
this love persists.

I built you this nest,
left it half untidy,
for you to make it your own.

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As I enter the third semester where we write an essay I have become intrigued by what poetry really is, and can it ever be workshopped. Is the act of writing a poem simply a cathartic moment of release, and each subsequent version is a dilution of that moment? Perhaps.

As I returned from Forest Grove, Oregon, my daughter come into our bedroom and informed me of devastating news.

I instantly wrote this poem, and minor edits did follow. The revelation for me in this sadness, as I explained to my wife, is that poetry, for me, is how I process the world - and maybe that’s what poetry is after all.

-

Upon learning my daughter’s friend’s adoptive mother died

I studied the Douglas Fir in our garden and contemplated when does a tree know it’s fully grown?
As it arcs into the sky, is it conscious of memory?
Is a river no longer a river when it becomes the sea? Haven’s mum died today.
I wonder about her in Oregon, whether she looks differently at the same trees,
and if life will simply carry on as it stretches toward the clouds.
One death, when the body leaves the world, the other —
a vast ocean rocking back and forth against an empty shoreline.

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Upon learning David Hockney passed away

I am reminded I am 49, this year,
and all that truly matters in life is love and art.
And perhaps our cat, Lowry.
The rest of my existence will be spanning time
between the two.
I befriended a dragonfly today, and Elon Musk became a trillionaire.

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Last week, during a conversation with the wonderful Phil Bevis (Chatwin Books, Asterism, Arundel Bookstore), we discussed D. H. Lawrence’s The Ship of Death and how he wrote the poem again, and again. Phil’s favorite was the sixth version.

Unintentionally, I set out on a journey inspired by that poem. It became a poem I worked on for over a week, spending nearly five hours a day on a single piece — something I rarely do.

The challenge, of course, is that there is immense satisfaction, joy, and relief in finally completing a poem. Yet the writer, being inside the poem, has no real way of knowing whether it lands with readers outside. Rather like the dying wasp caught inside the fig.

The Adriatic Fig

I.

Late spring, and the cherry blossom tears open the sky.

The wasp surrenders her defiance — dying to pollinate the fig.

Children’s footsteps burbling, gurgling, small hands out of reach.

A swirling murmuration swallows blue air swallows —

a pier.

II.

Midsummer, and the dress, and the beating sun, and the sheets,

and Ostuni, the white city, ploughing the sea.

You bit the tomb — bled scarlet, staining your gown. Cursing

stickiness, entwined, not knowing what we’d swallowed —

or begun.

III.

Autumn fermented on our drunken breath,

and with it, you carried secrets in rows of rose flesh.

Digging crimson tunnels through mausoleum seams,

in movement, in silence, the opening concealed —

a warm seed.

IV.

Pale Winter. Bare-knuckled branches. Fallen fruit.

Rotten remnants, pungent, feeding the ground.

Cocooned inside this intimate chamber, blind and wingless,

my lover, ferrying toward the light, and I waited —

with the others.

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I went outside and sat on our stoop, the fresh paint
filling my nose. We’d discovered rotten wood where the rain leaked in.
When our children learned to walk, my days were overcome with fear
of their soft skulls against mahogany edging —
mind your head, mind your head, mind your head, I’d peck,
wrapping my arms around them, bringing them in close.

Where does time end
between the pages we leave open on kitchen counters
beside unwatered plants,
the widow at the window.
Buddleia overreaching in late summer
and elk drifting at the tree line,
antlers tangled in the undergrowth
before disappearing into shadow.
 
A shot rings out somewhere beyond the ridge.
Then the delayed collapse —
brush scattering, leaves disturbed,
one body entering the stillness.
The world barely pauses. Trucks pass.
The sea worrying the shoreline in long repeating fifths,
horsehair pulling deep oval sounds
through willow and ash.
 
The sour pear — Bartlett, Comice, Anjou —
hangs overripe from its branch,
hardened skin concealing softened flesh.
Fruit flies dance around the ceramic bowl
she bought at Goodwill.
 
You say we live in a microclimate of our own making.
When I wax, you wane.
When you bleed, I shave my beard.
Tidal bound.
The unsightly tenderness
of blood washing past greying pubic hair.

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Had I become crooked,

or was I always this way?

The lightning tree bares

its frozen branches

a brittle-limbed memorial,

taut arms veining a clouded sky.

We don’t remember the fruit it bore,

the shade it offered,

the life it held.

Only the beauty of what is broken.

Had I become crooked,

or was I always this way?

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In that moment,
I watched the rain crash down and caress tarmac
leaving musky remnants of clouds and
You were beautiful then.

Draped off the edge of the curb, drenched,
I was astounded.
This love was ever so young and
You were beautiful then.

Now, in time, I look back
to find a stillness in regret
but what lingers is that day and
You were beautiful then.

And you're beautiful now.
Buried between flowers and earth
where the roots arc over bone
and vines climb imaginary tombs

And you’re beautiful now.
Silent in your prose
as sepulchral dreams
repeat themselves over and over.

And you’re beautiful now.
Gone and gone, forever gone.
As you’ll always be, 
beautiful now.

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When my son returned
	he threw his school bag
angrily against the wall
	ran headlong upstairs
red-faced slamming doors.
	There was not much to say
as I picked up his rucksack
	to empty his half eaten lunch
the paper fell on the floor
	handscrawled 8 year-old cursive.

‘the snowy peaks’

i see a hiker
i feel snow
i hear whistling wind
i smell flowers
i regret my life choices
i keep on going
when i get back down
i skip rocks at the beach

folding his poem
I slide it under the door.

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I’ve never been particularly interested in mastering the sonnet in its traditional sense. The certainty of rhyme, the inevitability of closure, for me, it can feel too resolved for the kind of emotional terrain I’m trying to explore - and I rebel against constraints or structured. My work tends to lean toward something more provisional: moments that hover, that resist conclusion, that remain slightly unfinished.

Out of that tension, this new poetry form began to emerge.

The Triptych Sonnet is a fourteen-line poem composed of three haiku followed by a five-line closing movement in iambic pentameter. The haiku operate as discrete image-fields—compressed, sensory, and often unconnected on the surface. Each one captures a moment in time: memory, dream, observation. Together, they build pressure without explanation.

The final five lines shift register. This is where the poem turns, where reflection, relation, or meaning begins to cohere. In most cases, not as resolution.

If the traditional sonnet is an argument, the Triptych Sonnet is accumulation followed by reckoning.

In many ways, this form feels aligned with the questions I am asking myself in my practice around how memory fragments, how domestic life accrues meaning over time, and how we attempt, often imperfectly, to bind experience into something that resembles coherence.

This is one of the poems in that form.

Domestic Sonnet III - Triptych Sonnet Form

Wolf moon above us.
Tying thread around your wrist—
memory thins out.

Winter nights wrestling
alligators in my sleep.
Coyotes break dawn light.

Ferry horn carries
commuters across gray sound.
A small migration.

Today, I shelved poems along worn wood.
O’Hara leans toward Merwin’s tempered hush.
Gilbert stands near Olds in measured light.
Their spines hold what the night would pull far
and what we tie to keep from drifting apart.

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Does the bird of paradise know what he gives up when his mate succumbs to the dance, we only ever see the ritual, never the long lived after.

It’s true even his feathers leave marks upon her body.

I used to count the moles on your body, and our smells would fill the basement. We’d plant apple trees beside reservoirs, where we wondered how the fish ever made it there.

Now we sleep apart, dreaming of different meadows where autumn springs eternal and tired hands are comforted by touch, and touch alone.

By touch we are alone.

In the morning, when you asked if I loved you, I left this poem on your desk and danced out into the field, headed to the coast.

The horizon blistered the skyline, starlings undulated by the burnt pier.

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The mail arrives from the local council
there’s arsenic in our water, it’s fine, so they say.
It’s 13:52, my daughter calls 
pick up from Wingpoint
Laser tag 	birthday spoils 	squirter guns 	sugar high
We talk about London, the first visit in seven years
green card 		permanent resident 		US citizen 
They do not know the name of their grandmother
“Nigel,” my son quips, “Robin, perhaps?”
We laugh.
Their surname is my step-father’s mother’s maiden name 
we all agree it’s better than Smith. 
I recount a full complement of sisters 
biological		half				step
and I do not love any.
Paul Simon hums too low to decipher, 
he’s bouncing through tenements.
We buy discounted zero-calorie water, read the ingredients 
Calcium disodium EDTA, Potassium Benzoate
We drink anyway.
It’s 14:43 and a war rages on.

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