It happens when the drift--rebounding of the wind's
a sound of flint to strike a spark from steel
understandings that were meant for us
here suddenly in the history of why
I have these matters to address, simply
things to say and a form to fashion a kind
of wholeness that begs no difference,
denies no fissure in the gemstone,
pries into the copse of it, says all
elements will move you forward in
time, the model more elusive
now than ever, if no one to fool.

As natural as hunger to a body,
a sheet of iron, a stalk of corn,
an agate in our hands claiming
the right to petition an assembly,
perform the seams of a nectar
drawn with bright nervous pulses
across the clearing of us here,
and the city there producing
lures to keep me penultimate
from the satisfied frets and roses
like warm milk. The haunted
matter hovering beyond reach,
teaching his lover to delay and
ankles raised above my shoulders
so it glistened like tourmaline,
a summer fruit in the moist air
as far as I was asked to crawl when

not entirely of independent means
to know the effort of body and mind
to an end, or useful for a special
purpose in sums payable in return
for services rendered by time in
wages per hour for the purchasing
of coal from India, gold from Brazil,
tea from Rwanda and oil from Kuwait



                                             (Salgado)


Roberto Tejada was born in Los Angeles (1964) and presently lives in Buffalo, New York. From 1987 to 1997 he worked in Mexico City, where he founded the English-Spanish annual Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. His art writing, photography, criticism, literary essays, and translations appear regularly in catalogs and journals in the United States and Latin America. Gift & Verdict, an ongoing work, investigates the subjectivities, imaginations, and politics of the New World.