The Evocative Unsaid
Early in the pandemic, poet Sandy Yannone started Cultivating Voices Live Poetry a weekly series offering poets and poetry readers a safe venue. Sandy is a remarkable poet and a force of nature. Six years later, this series is still going, still cultivating an international community. Early on, closed up in my study, I discovered poem after poem, poet after poet, in the limitless Zoom space Sandy made available. During a Sunday reading featuring newly released collections, I heard Gustavo Hernandez read from his debut collection, Flower Grand First. I ordered the book, read the poems, and followed Hernandez on social media. Last year, as soon as Bachelor, his second collection, became available, I ordered a copy.
As I turned the pages, I found myself starring numerous favorites in the table of contents. Titles alone are thematic here. By my quick count, seven poems are titled simply “Bachelor,” five, “Nocturne,” and six, “Conclusion,”—each one reflecting on facets of Hernandez’s life as a single man, often at home alone during the dark hours—and reaching no definitive conclusions about what it means to be a bachelor. Ordinarily, by the way, I refer to the I of a poem as “the narrator.” But these are deeply personal poems. I think the author would agree when I identify the narrator of Bachelor as Gustavo Hernandez.
Let me quote the first of the conclusion poems:
Conclusion
It is that I feel alone.
The rest, you should know, is the rent-a-bed and my keys
next to the television. The whole room if you’d like it.
Orange County winding down outside and dark gray.
Everyone I’ve been with this spring has felt like something
more than me. God after God.
Gods like the weathermen calling the last arcs of rain.
I’ve never figured it out.
How to trust myself or predict even one action in the sky.
It is supposed to come down again tonight.
A man undresses in front of me.
From his jacket I can tell the first drops must have fallen
while I was watching him smoke in the parking lot.
Gustavo Hernandez
Bachelor (Flowersong Press, 2025)
Consider the blunt singularity of the opening line—the bachelor’s conclusion “that I feel alone.”
Spare details follow: “the rent-a-bed and my keys / next to the television.” The setting—“Orange County winding down outside and dark gray” as night approaches, lonesome as a solitary nocturne.
Then: “Everyone I’ve been with this spring . . .” I’m reminded here of what Hemingway said about the powerful resonance of what is left unsaid—how much Hernandez evokes here, in the blank space between terse stanzas: the stark contours of a rented motel-room bed where the poem’s narrator has been with a series of men—“Gods like the weatherman calling the last arcs of rain.” The weathermen can predict rain. Hernandez can’t. He can’t “trust myself or predict even one action in the sky.”
Another double space and then: “It is supposed to come down again tonight.” The reference is rain, of course, but the idiomatic usage “supposed to come down” suggests Hernandez is on the cusp of a significant moment, hence the second line in this couplet, which feels like a non sequitur but isn’t: “A man undresses in front of me.”
The poem has opened with a conclusion—“that I feel alone.” Ten lines on, when a man undresses, when the blank space that follows suggests sexual intimacy, the poem’s surprise is that, in a moment like this, the I of the poem still feels alone, as in the lovely ache of Hernandez’s closing image:
From his jacket I can tell the first drops must have fallen while I was watching him smoke in the parking lot.
What I love most about this poem is how much trust Gustavo Hernandez places in us—to read between the lines, to linger with him at a motel room window, watching a man outside who will soon enter and take off his clothes.
About the Author
Gustavo Hernandez was born in Jalisco, Mexico and lives in Southern California.
Bachelor is available here ⇒
Flower Grand First is available here ⇒