Two people stand in the middle of a downtown street while everyone else tries to get past them. Art Gomez builds "Crossroad Empires" on that odd little scene: a woman who conducts music nobody can hear, and a man who fly-fishes over dry pavement. The poem never says who they are or why they do it. "What plays in her head is anyone's guess," the speaker admits, and that refusal to diagnose is the poem's quiet generosity. Rather than pitying or mocking them, the speaker grants each a "stage" and takes a seat in the audience.
The central idea is that imagination can claim public space, even briefly, and that the claim is both absurd and dignified. The title holds both feelings. An "empire" the size of an intersection is a joke, yet the speaker later calls these patches of road "dominions," and the grand word is not entirely ironic. Gomez lets the street be three things at once: a concert hall ("podium," "orchestra pit," "symphonic honk"), a trout stream ("traffic riffles," "the damned stream"), and a plain road with plain danger. The vocabulary slips between these worlds. The conductor "casts a spell," borrowing the angler's verb, and "riffles," meaning shallow, rippling water, sounds like a musical riff. Even the drivers join in, their horns "increase dynamics" and build "crescendos." Everyone on the street is performing, whether they mean to or not.
Several words carry a second meaning. The fisherman is "determined to find meaning / when there is always a catch before his release." In catch-and-release fishing you hook something only to let it go, so he can never keep what he finds. But a "catch" is also a snag, a hidden condition, so his search for meaning comes with a built-in hitch. "Damned stream" can be read as "dammed," blocked by traffic, or as cursed, and the line works either way. The closing phrase "performance sweeps" suggests the wide sweep of a baton or a fishing rod. It may also nod to television's ratings "sweeps," a hint that the two are competing for an audience, which echoes the opening doubt: "in cahoots or competition."
The poem is in free verse with no rhyme, and its shape does much of the arguing. The opening stanzas are four calm lines, almost like a news report: "within a block of each other / near the northern edge of downtown." When the cars arrive, the stanzas shrink to couplets, as if the space itself were being squeezed. Then comes the one stanza that breaks the pattern, a single unbroken sentence in which the speaker finally says "I": "Being between two showpieces, I watch both." The clauses pile up ("while more cars arrive, increase dynamics of horn blow crescendos, then inch in") until the sentence runs out at "a thousand pounds of steel." The reader loses breath the way the performers lose room. Sound supports this too. The hard k sounds of "cahoots," "competition," and "claim" give the opening a clipped, territorial feel, and "determined" returns for the fisherman, a small echo of obsession.
The final couplet is the most moving: "Reluctantly, but with impeccable choreography, they relinquish..." The adverb admits loss, while the adjective refuses to call it defeat. Even surrender becomes part of the dance, and the ease of it suggests a routine they have performed before, though that is an inference, since the poem doesn't say so. The poem is worth reading for this balance. It neither romanticizes the two figures nor looks away from them, and it turns the reader, like the speaker, from a passerby into an audience.