I feel like there are always questions someone should be asked after they’ve said they’re from somewhere. Something more than just, “Where’s that?” When I was in the Navy, people would ask where I was from, and I would say, “Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.” And they would always think I was saying something stupid, because where else would Oklahoma City exist. But I liked the joke in it. The idea that something about this centralized city would be the quintessential expression of what “Oklahoma” means. Though it isn’t. And that’s kind of the dilemma to saying you’re from anywhere. It means something to you, but it means nothing to anyone who’s not from there. “You see this and this and this” is one approach Emiliano Gomez takes in these selections from Townies. Where the this you see is “tracks.” Or you see mountains. There are these men there. They’re sad. The men see all these tracks around them, and the poem implies the men know what the tracks mean. But as readers, who are from outside the town where the “Townies” in the poem live, should we know what the tracks mean?
It makes me think of the geometry of a circle. The line drawing the circle’s boundaries, and how, reading the circumference line, we’re supposed to see everything inside the line as the circle. Geometry makes it so thorough and complete. Behold: a circle! And there don’t seem to be any questions about why the line had to go where it did. And what happens when the area of a circle is more than just space. What if the space is occupied by people? They’re a population. What if the circle demarcated a town, with the men living inside it, and the “kind of sad men love” encompassing the town, like there were tonal qualities of the town.
It would hopefully lend the town some further vaguenesses. Is the sadness a consistent tone across the town, like a circle that’s been shaded a consistently cold shade of blue? If sadness lends the men a “blackhole-esque” quality, is that sadness only exaggerated when the men look towards the “tracks” that mark the edge of this town? And when they’re looking further to the orchards, and the sierra mountains, are there more feelings? Does it matter about the more or less of feelings for the sake of this poem?
Which is just what “trying” might look like in a poem titled “Townies.” And it’s this trying, what it means to try, how the poem “tries” over the five different sections published by Mercury Firs using English and Spanish, that makes the try less about identifying where this town is. The “tries” here is in that “essayer” spirit of trying, like Michel de Montaigne, who would “try” describing what was supposed to be easily describable, but then turned more complex, or his trying to describe it overcomplicated it. What really is a liar? What’s idleness? And somewhere in that space of trying and complication lies Gomez’s rhythm to trying in these five sections of “Townies.” A rhythm that can get lost as it identifies the edges of town, what constitutes an edge, and how that edge might offer clarity or vagueness. A rhythm to trying that is about trying again with a new section, a new language for that section, what might be closer or looser translations as it shifts from English to Spanish to English again.
And where it ultimately stands for me is how repeating the town’s existing “tracks” and “orchards” and “mountains” at the edge makes it feel like the town has a closed circuit to it. Like how you might use the first section to draw this town as a circle using light pencil strokes, because the edges are vague, then with the next section you’d draw another circle on top of that one, with those same light pencil strokes, and that next circle would approximate the first. Then you just keep doing that with each of the five sections here in Mercury Firs, so the “circle” formed by these five lighter versions is even more pronounced, even if each of the line is only committing to a vague sense of a line. Like a community that is avidly connected to what it means being in this community. And multiplying that out.