One of my favorite images in all of contemporary fiction comes from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, when the landscape of urban Southern California is described as if an exposed transistor radio’s circuit board. Pynchon writes: “Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.” Som, the winner of the 2015 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for his collection The Tribute Horse, is a poet constantly speaking to the woven music of ancestry, land, language. His poetry, as seen in these evocative, riddled lyrics excerpted from an extended sequence below, also seems bent on a hieroglyphic sense to conceal and communicate (conceal to communicate?). His brainy dance with language uncovers the way words are gutted with meaning: migrant, transhistorical, technological, bilingual. Or as he himself says here much more vividly: “pigtails of transistors.” The cross-wiring (cross-writing) of this poet’s radio soul is something we should all keep a close listen to.
—Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Editor
from Tripas
Cómo se dice—
my circuitry—
sews me—me cose—
word by word
(cottonwood—
remember el alamo)
& dictates—
how do you say?
She translates
wires me from
the Latin weaves me
Rewires rosary—
Rosario was my
mom’s name, she tells me
Decades pray me
an aria con cuerdas
—como Ariadne
Me recuerda—rewires me
Brought home diode
leads to straighten
at the kitchen table
Her niños—my years
later tías & tíos —
home from Sierra Vista
lent a hand & pulled
pigtails of transistors—
leaping code switches
& warming tortillas
Their work knit wavelength
to towers—spoolers
like great bobbins
Oir origins—
an echo in the hecho
años de manos
that string & assemble
the skip rope of radio
Read of a simple cellphone
re-wired to witcher
shaking—like a hazel
switch for the dowser—
& guiding migrants
to where water is cached
Considered Aquarius
& the mouth-strung fish
soldered on the zodiac:
how the sun in the ecliptic
—like a radio’s dial—
forecast rains to come
‘Mojados’ my tío once
shouted out the car window
at the newly arrived
punched the cassette tape
(Bill Withers ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’)
& sped through the light
Hermes my hermano
—of the megahertz
her hands made—
Orphic with orejas
messages a mestizaje
over transverse wave
Ola is amp & trough
Frequency = waves
passing a given point:
Nogales or black walnut
Nowa:l in O’odham
for the prickly pear
ear-like in Sonora—
a border-crossing desert
with ‘voice constant’
Motor(ola)—the first
maquila here ‘to assemble’
—arrived in 1967
Corridos in corridors
of cognates—
arroz is arroz is arroz
White long grain
browned in skillet oil
boiled in tomaté
Add garlic & cebolla
Simmer covered
Ya serví Ya me voy
Served us the color
of sundowns Siéntate—
up over us the Lord’s
Last Cena Say grace—
a seine net cast
With purse & badge
she left then for
nightshift Estrellas stray
We clutch & sift
