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
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