Gabriel Gomez

I can’t tell you I had climbed for hours on ledges and crawled through gaps in the earth. My hands negotiating through the teeth of the palisade lipped under the vineyard of temperate skies. And I can’t tell you that I came onto a ledge within the shelter of a granite roof, ceaselessly carved by centuries of dripping water. Feeding from pooled water and singular sunlight a chamisa plant sat like a chopped wood. The opposite end of root speaking for its entirety through silence and color. And I wish I could tell you that at the moment I met its splitting scent under the enormity of stone your name appeared in my throat with clarity. And I wish we were old and in front of a grand painting, a picture or postcard of Picasso’s “Guernica” perhaps. It would be then that I would tell you Picasso once said that it took him his entire life to learn how to paint like a child. It would be through these words that would make you understand the same clarity that pooled over me on that ledge those years before when as a young man I extended like direction, like timbre itself for a dying song that echoed your name.

The kinship with those humans who speak directly to me is webbed to the ceiling. An economy of satellites, a cosmos, where revision we think comes without the benefit of our witness. A peculiar time when stars with modest faces sleep in enormity and mirror death like a child’s infirmity that despite socio-economics is still an illness, definitive as fading paint grossing a distant understanding from a stain pooled from its center resonant of some terrific nucleus making sense of its own words with the strangest electricity.

I. sound knots pinned to a fabric-less body form of oak bone a barreled chest the presence of acoustic music over the instrument resting on your lap a limited vehicle               but you knew that having learned tablature the guitar posed in sculpture clear its throat by reaching the oval gap flushed against stomach into its curious sound gather fingers around an inexhaustible voice and play the strings II. bread shaped to song as we ate and fidgeted the pitch of river frozen to stillness           a film reeled and taut swelling water oily in its cold steps before it hardens an utterance before song is shaped a compression of freezing water eating away at its own babbling face III. where are the boxes of clothes the newspaper to scoop inside of cups feel free to comment miss nothing as of chewing a new food these are features of comfort a lower altitude, moved further but           no egg crate to snug the ends of the hutch a chimera of tempered sand speak of her house absolved by the wiping ocean speak of her name by way of mountains the mirrors          silver flaking for the edges of the mirrors leaving only glass             unreflective patches the promised half the unanswerable ruin of aperture                       begging from where you haven’t seen yourself in years