Will Alexander

Ravenous Spectral Pores

By exercising
cryptic tales of ponies & harems
I distract
from whatever cause is pouring
vis à vis necessitous solar inferno as mirrors reflect one’s ravenous
      spectral pores
that condense as a summary form of glass
so should I wander across its sums
I understand that my speculation issues from tornadic rivers
from ice-hot temperatures
so that I am both sans & simultaneous
concerning billions & billions
of curious antecedents

The Raven as Incantatory Nuclei

As an invisible tri-unial spell
that parallels as crucial invisible species
not as outward glow or movement or techniques that console as
     frottage
but as inward alacrity
not as mechanism
as a consoling blue raven yet it vanishes into a random chronicle
     into billionths & billionths of tonality as consciousness
& dissolves & rises as momentary habitation
never at the scale that evinces as noun-based palpability
but presence sans pattern as palpability
without winged industry that engulfs its own mirage
not philosophical claustrophobia
or conscripted in-souciance
but as Planck current
sans symbolic leprosy rate
because it flies not as dazed religious beacon
no longer symbolic of embrangled chariots carving their own
     distance through self-proclaimed inferno
but as un-colored quarks & kinetics as bottomless mass
as sub-atomic proton thesis
as simultaneous blue light
as curious sapphire foundry burning
majestic
within the predatory realms
of its own incantatory nucleii

Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and musician. He has published over two dozen books in a variety of genres and has earned many honors and awards including a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry, a California Arts Council Fellowship, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and the 2016 Jackson Poetry Prize. Among his publications are Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021/Granta, 2022), which was named a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and won the California Book Award for Poetry, The Combustion Cycle (Roof, 2021), Across the Vapor Gulf (New Directions, 2017), and The Sri Lankan Loxodrome (New Directions, 2009). He is currently the poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. 

“The Raven as Incantatory Nuclei” and “Ravenous Spectral Poses” from Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) by Will Alexander. Copyright © 2022 by Will Alexander. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books, www.citylights.com.

https://citylights.com/general-poetry/divine-blue-light-pocket-poets-63/