John C Gonzalez, Gray Deep, Blue Lt, and Red, on Green Fav, 2023 (Artist Website)
Acrylic on panel, 4-color all over
Days spent within words, nights listening
to a colony of tree frogs who live
near a forgotten pool, who call
into the canopy, into the streets laid quiet
by darkness, to the foxes nudging
hedges, slinking a path between cars,
it’s a song for insomnia, its peculiar exile,
for July and the years spread out between summers,
between life and death, the taste of magnolia
on their tongues, all their small hearts
hanging onto branches, thumping the cadence
of a short life and its collapsed years
in which all manner of miracles must occur.
Is it enough that the trilling feels like a tether,
a line that opens the past, is it enough
to remember her as sound, a lament
called out from the trees? Here, she says,
I’m here, I’ve never left this vale of leaves.