Forrest Gander reads from Will Alexander’s “The Sri Lankan Loxodrome”
Poetry of America: A Collection of Field Recordings by Award-winning Contemporary Poets

from The Sri Lankan Loxodrome

in this fundamental sense
I am Mahayana & of Africa
both Sri Lankan & non-Sri Lankan 
in that
I am of a newly elected “Radial” width
comprehending my projection of rays
like faceless chromium at twilight
an absence
like “intergalactic hydrogen”
perhaps a complex of gravitons & lightning

I learned to speak when my solar journal first commenced
then I was magnetized at the age of 12 to a psychic form of fatherhood
& now I sail
never eating for days consumed by scalar neutrinos

I’ve been reported as expired at Jaffna
& have been burned in effigy for interminable wanderings
for the crime of emitting vertigo by movement
for inflicting the human spirit with a parallel genetic engenderment
comparable to a sun which erupts from the voice of the afterlife

a wanderer in a zone of fluctuating kelvins
breathing unknown dice within my schisms

****
perhaps for me
a Nubian catacomb in the nameless
a concealed adventure in the tourmaline
a powerful spectra of intangible chondrites

maybe as darkened transition
I’ll speak an aqua-Chinese
or as an Afro-Gujarati I’ll have a voice in Batticaloa
alive in Madagascar
as a combusted lemur sage

I develop moment after moment
with intensity as aloofness
allowing each destroyed symmetry
each ulterior symbology
to ignite its hazeless unicorns
to unbury spells amidst “black widow pulsars”
wafting
between equilibria & equilibria
aleatoric & unblemished
like a moonless endurance
within a “grazing occultation”
& each fire that I build
vanishes
each clause of interregnums
detractable
amidst the rural dominations
of “Istar Terra”
& the “anomaly over Beta Regio”
like a brimstone fire
at the source of the instantaneous

—Will Alexander