standing under the ex-wife’s house concrete pillars covered in the hieroglyphics of grubby little hands hanging pieces of antique chairs that we had planned to restore together arm-rests of that old couch, the old dining table that belonged in our first house, silent in this elephant’s graveyard of carved husks there are the spider-legs of a hotplate that fed the guests at our little boy’s Naming Ceremony when suddenly I realise, I’m caught! gazing over the past this ensemble of assorted relics she’s been busy under here making the sander scream the electric plane has been driving the kids nuts as she shaves the timber the skins of furniture from one of my lives golden curls of treated pine sit at the floor of the workbench I remember reading Robert Adamson’s poetry the day she called it quits over and over, I read the poems about a troubled boy and his blond mop of curls I look down and my own little boy has found a pile of shavings grabs a handful in his muffin-fist holds it at me falling through his grasp these curls, What are they Daddy?! They’re pieces of my brain, I tell him and he tosses his fist into the air particles swab us like pixie dust the afternoon sun steals through catches the golden flakes and my little boy’s toothy grin he wakes me before I drown in a tide of old regrets