In tackling both temporolinguistic loss and the loss of an essential home or being-on-the-earth and in Venezuela, I have shown how Montejo repeatedly ties the space of the poem to the apparently authentic times and places to which he appeals: his childhood casa, the bakers’ taller, the terredad of the natural canto del gallo, and the poetic construction of home. It is the authentic poetic space that appears as the mythic, timeless locale for which Montejo strives in his work, and it is, thus, through the work of the poet that such poetic authenticity is to be (re)found and (re)forged. Consistently, the problem facing the poet in his task is characterised by a latent and ineluctable tension which permeates Montejo’s writing. Inextricably linked to the nature of language itself, this often appears as a tension between life and death, presence and absence, in particular the contrast between temporal, fleeting life and a permanence free from and beyond death. In his early work this tension manifests itself through the dominant and recurring images of the caballo and the casa, images which continue to surface into his later poetry, where they are joined by the poetics of journeys and homeland, river and stone. In each case the poet attempts to locate and bring about the authentic construction or space for himself, his country, and humankind, a space found at the chimeric and mythic border at which both terms of the tension meet, and a space identifiable both with the impossible centre which is free from the play and rupture of différance in Derridean terms and with the moment of irruption into being, on the level of both the individual (birth) and the world. This envisaged space of the poem is, then, where the tension between the terms might be turned into harmony, the harmony which Montejo repeatedly declares himself to be seeking (‘mi alma | que siempre sueña la imposible armonía’ (‘Las avispas’, AM, 196)). Nevertheless, that such a feat is unrealisable is underscored in one of Montejo’s later poems, ‘Contramúsica’ (PC), which also emphasises that the tension which Montejo seeks to harmonise is that found within language itself: