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.