Timbre
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.
Copyright Credit: Gabriel Gomez, "Timbre" from The Outer Bands. Copyright © 2007 by Gabriel Gomez. Reprinted by permission of Gabriel Gomez.
Source: The Outer Bands (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007)