Roberto Tejada is the author of art and media histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (U Minnesota, 2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (UCLA/CSRC; U Minnesota, 2009); with Michelle White and others he is the co-author of Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021). His book of essays and manifestos, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019), is a LatinX cultural poetics of the Americas. Tejada is the author of poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006), and Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), selected poems in Spanish translation. He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.

Time Insufficient


When    austerity is there    a siren 

haze and hiss      whenever the apologetic noise 

a   clatter        tick-tick      this 

when in everyday direction ---- left on 

Taft from Allen Parkway ----

does a minute any longer allow?


•


Of despair Audre Lorde said 

it can serve to make intractable ---- song 

even in the indistinct concealment

drives the law of number and person is

my self-abstraction any more 

or less obscure and how disputable?

 
•


Here in the meanwhile is 

my telling of a scene      disfiguring

slow-motion motive   for persons

you could never really reach     in time 

   I mean it being insufficient to 

the near now  archaic       now faraway