Take in these shrapnel fragments of aria slowly, word by word—or, as the collection’s epigraph, “To make sounds rather than what sounds to make” by Pauline Oliveros, philosopher of “Deep Listening” suggests, their mode of operation is be taken in sound by sound, these the dirge-prayers of a remnant-song blown skyward, with Tejada’s forebears (Benjamin, Lorde, Jay Wright, Oppen) running in the background.
Both Oliveros’ epigraph and Tejada’s allegiance as translator to the oeuvre of José Lezama Lima orient the reader to enter what is proffered as ambient sounds and images taken in at any moment, offered to the principality of speech as Tejada’s idiosyncratic, secular homage to the dignity of each human being, especially those who are the objects of some phantasmagoric internment by other—this collection Tejada’s oblation offered to a source or godhead or to anyone who is willing to hear their cries of innocence.
Tejada’s epigraphs for each station (“Desierto de Chihuahua,” “Orphan Hill, Presidio County,” “Bicentennial Boulevard,” “Puente Brownsville-Matamoros,” six stations in all) are points of entry to this spectral catechism: “The dead are the imagination of the living. And/For the dead, unlike the living, the circumference/of the sphere is neither frontier nor barrier.” (John Berger) or “Listen, I’ve heard of this countable, nameable thing/we call an individual. But must we sustain it?” (Jay Wright)
In the collection’s lead-off poem “Hangman,” notice the verbs. Tejada begins: “Green in the glade where the forest infatuates [a verb of brief passion] /where children who dulcify [a rare verb meaning “to sweeten”] before they unnerve and vanish from sight in the story....”
In the poem’s denouement, “And because the fable/must end in demise/said the sparrow hidden/inside the human voice” with its allusion to Matthew 10:29-31, Tejada splices the mirages of the desaparecido, “the fable that must end in demise” of those who vanish voluntarily or are abducted and taken into the forest (Hansel and Gretel, lovers disappearing into the Bois de Boulogne, the assassinated, trafficked and raped) to the image of his own dead mother’s manic cackle and wish to choke the sparrowed throat of the narrator.
In “Macula,” the narrator-cum-child meets his mother’s fist, sees a galaxy of stars, his a Jack-be- nimble’s escape from a sadism to which a God’s condemnation has been fused “no matter the saints for the sake of his error,” the narrator an escape artist both driven by Thanatos and a desire to escape the fate of the mastodon in the tarpits as he tumbles from the branches of a loquat tree—he, too, a kind of hangman.
In “Night Festival,” the narrator captures the voices of his own dead parents (“and there is my father/with his remorse as imposing as the Andes”... “his mother in “her lofty/decibels and coffee-milk austerity saltines”) the poem a phantasmagoria of visitation, Tejada tells us in the notes, “in order to reflect the enormity of a moment that so excites one’s imagination as to reach a radical impasse.” Very soon one comes to understand that the Desierto de Chihuahua of which Tejada speaks is a figurative place: desert, from the Latin desertum, wasteland, a thing abandoned, an infatuation or nostalgia saturating the idea of it, turning an imagined emptiness into a landscape of desire—from the Latin desidero: to feel a yearning for something lacking or absent, to regret.
Written under the title Carbonate of Copper, that blue surrogate for the aquamarine of lapis lazuli used in the writing of holy icons thought, once blessed, to become animate pilgrims on their journey, these poems, written in carbonate of copper, however secularized and torn, go forth on a journey marked by place names or stations of “the frangible hour of his crisscross,” “absent of images” (icon), “in exile”, “even as a belligerence,” offered as oblation to a source or to anyone who is their listener, the reader become a Rilkean angel among the hierarchies, in the principality of speech:
so much of the source
or whatever remained of its depleted shape
a residue of sound
like an orphan
like a mind he said was absent of images
in exile
an enigma
a belligerence
in servitude to the principality of speech an oblation
(from “Oblation”)
Into Tejada’s imaginarium we go as companions, his poems often written as “a form of resistance,” in a poetic with intentional lacunae and gaps (“I leave something out another form of refusal” from “Speaking Part”). Their aesthetic harbors back to the difficulty of Celan’s late poems or the disintegration of identity recorded in Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (“Inspiration has no other meaning than the anteriority of the poem in relation to the poet, the act which he feels as being still to come, in his life and work, still absent with regard to his poetic activity which in itself is nothing but absence and futurity.”), this collection Tejada’s future archive of our progressive desertification and vanishing. Sit with these poems a while. Your perceptions will adjust, and you will begin to see an unravelling that has always been apparent to the ones oppressed long before the privileged and entitled see. Understand what is being spoken here. The poem and the extremity from which it springs will open to you. Thus, the reader must choose an interpretation, must wrestle the daemon or angel of Tejada’s difficulty, what the language leaves out, travelling with him from station to station. If you persevere, the gift of these poems will open to you, like the voice of an endangered plant to a botanist, you the eavesdropper of Tejada’s own sacred heart secularized by worldly oppression—the making of a poem an alembic or distillery of voice, one hopes, of our moment of being in the unravelling.