Wild Cogs: Haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré

 

Wild Cogs: Haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré

Wild Cogs is a small book that came out of SECOND NATURE, our October 2026 Fall ArtScene exhibition at Rockford Art Deli.

For SECOND NATURE, Rockford artist Michael Zant created sculptures of animals and other forms from salvaged metal—the discarded mechanical stuff of human life reassembled into birds, bears, frogs, turtles, insects, and other creatures.

Tré and I wrote haiku to accompany Michael’s sculptures.

We approached the poems the same way we approached our earlier book Moonscape: Haiku Phase I: two poets looking at the same world from slightly different places. The haiku alternate between us, sometimes answering one another, sometimes wandering off in different directions.

Those poems became Wild Cogs, a 40-page pocket-sized collection published by Wolf Twin Books.

Here are a few of the conversations from the book.

Pawpaw

pawpaw season—
the road home
sweet on our hands

Thomas L. Vaultonburg

our mouths travel
over wild custard—
picaresque

Tré

pairings

Frog, turtle, salamander

Plum Blossom

first plum blossom—
I almost tell you
everything again

Thomas L. Vaultonburg

not letting go
ice over
plum petals

Tré

Bear claw, lotus flower, dragonfly

The idea behind SECOND NATURE was simple: take what we've discarded and return it to the living world.

Michael did that with metal. Tré and I tried to do it with words.

The result is Wild Cogs—a little handmade record of the strange intersection between machinery, animals, poetry, friendship, and the natural world.

Wild Cogs
Thomas L. Vaultonburg & Tré
Wolf Twin Books, 2026
40 pages
$10

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