Time is slowed and sedimented in these poems by Roberto Tejada: people and environments are weathered, eroded, or worn down, outwardly placid but existing in a kind of insubordination. The poems themselves embody erosion through enjambment, caesurae, and lacunae: facts are suspended, proximate yet disjoined, yielding a weighty impressionism or middle-distance abstraction. But if time is a process of weathering, it is also the condition for apparition—the coming into perception of a view that may fade. When a landscape “obtains” in “Carbonate of Copper,” it projects a wholeness on things in order to consume them, things the poem’s spacing renders separate and out-of-sync. This oasis or mirage highlights temporalities otherwise out of joint, as the poem switches between layers of history, community, industrial and domestic labor. “They’re here,” declares the final line of “Residence,” sudden and foreboding like an event. And “the polyglots,” who might be scholars or descendants, appear from outside the address of the poem, rendering its speaker both in and of a view, in and out of time. – The Editors and the Poetry Staff

Roberto Tejada

Carbonate of Copper
in the hours I was left to the elements   sorely
colorless labor   evolving facts of a day

days now deficient in matters of fact
so many attachments of the tribe

to this stupefying circle         it burns
a new image of the earth   disabling

the view from nowhere
                                                   am I unsheltered
and so out of time  as to  wonder
does my face defy     its aim on end   am I
the architect  of this very small
thing I derive or refuse from the seven
descendants

                      does a landscape here
obtain  as when there was food    the field
abundant  sun  summer  green

river valley     chestnut     little balm
border    milestone

                                 came the builders
of a sudden     identical twins    at the sugar
mill     it has         a window overlooking
the carbonate of copper on shapes

predictive in the wireless ether

Residence

From paralysis of sleep and lamentation

left shoulder right        arm unable

to tell         which is

which     and who      the figure

exacting to know    why

the heartbreak       in hiding

encasement of wax     a hovel

tiny aperture       a viewfinder

they’re here       the polyglots