A pile of eyeglasses, gold-framed, resting in the dark. They belonged to my grandmother, and to my wife's grandmother and grandfather — three people, none of them still here. The frames are stacked and crossed so that it's hard to tell where one pair ends and another begins, the way it becomes hard, after enough time, to separate one person's absence from another's.

Light falls on the metal from nowhere in particular, the way memory does — arriving without a clear source, catching some things and leaving others in shadow. Cool blue and warm gold repeat in the reflections below, faint doublings of what's already there, the same objects seen again and again but never quite the same way twice.

I painted this for the cover of Sogni d’oro, my wife’s debut poetry chapbook. In it, Liz writes through the death and dying of close family members, turning to the natural and physical world to hold what Catholic teaching and Italian tradition couldn't fully answer — whether anyone can really be prepared for the loss of someone they love. Written largely in tankas, haibuns, and tanka prose, the poems look for spring inside a season of winter that doesn't seem to end, drawing strength from nature, from music, from the ordinary objects that quietly keep time. The collection is a place to sit with the details of a life and ask forgiveness for what was left unsaid. The title means "golden dreams" — what you say to someone before they sleep.

Rev. 09/2026