Poetry |

“Anterior Cartography”

Anterior Cartography

 

 

Certain wavelengths appear

not as beatific summation

but as feral anterior cartography where terror attempts to invade

            our interior translucency

 

translucence being magical

being evolutionary lightning

being a curious spinning of drought & transparency

that rises up from opposites

so incapability seemingly transpires where maimed grasses contort

            as untreated saliva

the latter being of spiraling truncation

of oblique & dazzling darkness

possessing epileptic strength that is awkward & improvident

as if the Sun had erupted & gone ill

 

according to higher rotational degree

I am able to view this first spoiled leakage

from clarified detritus

from splintered metrics & sand

 

so how does seeming drought silently erupt & explore itself?

 

perhaps as a mis-focused cataract filled with dimming ocean parts

            with nervous topiary eels

akin to negated asparagus rooting

 

thus

result as botched uranium entanglement

as flummoxed escalation

with general visage of characterological explanation creating

            animated rifts along the equator of the Nile

 

under this condition can we say that the moon blazes from a cold

            & rigorous coffin

from a despicable but dis-claiming that illuminates refractive

            properties from hell?

 

perhaps I remain an in-human courier from Draco

from in-celibate wastes

where proto-carrion feed

via unveiled obscurity that seems to not exist

where a phylum of tar is struck by un-impeachable lightning

that irrevocably pre-exists & becomes green and green-black

 

this being chemistry

that has extolled itself on a galleon of waters

guided by pre-imagined birds

by a syllabus prior to a cartography of rainbows

 

so how does this quell evil attacking organic wetlands?

 

one must persist in altering one’s view

as sub-atomic mimic

allowing to view the gist

that is European capital

with its dark vehicular thirst

 

with its blinded mechanical pieces tragically testing measurement

it remains none other than a serpent of cataracts

of doomed & fore-shortened brain stems

allowing one to see

fiendish ghosts

riled anathema ponies

that rotate as notation according to evil as famished consequence

according to stain as it secretes as a kind of negligible quanta

according to Dark sub-quanta & its variants

 

this is where ignition rivals itself

by fostering inclemency as blackness

as thriving tendency that graces collective identity with jaundiced

            ability

to ruin

to cast about as fate

conjoined to the skeletal negation of itself

 

& we know this level of option to be carnivorous

to be Salamandrine & opaque

akin to body according to brutish seizure

seemingly porous to malevolent instigation

 

because such culture remains sordid

not unlike congested flocks of vapour

cast in historical daylight

 

thus

natural cycles swarmed by exhaustion

via heretical investigation as trans-suggestive forces

because the zodiac has been transmuted

not vanquished & squandered away on a sub-liminal isle

where the mind can never explore itself or bear power according

            to medicinal enrapturement

according to medicinal listening as exposure

 

hence

suppression has cast its lot upon our neurological realm

& so it appears that the hieratic has tilted allowing other

            conditions to combine

& they inscrutably rise above telepathic claustrophobia

as shifts in one’s signaling that transpire & re-combine

according to the deftness of dice & anathema

as protected combinatorial combustion

so that perhaps an Oryx speeding through a wetland will furtively

            amaze itself

via its chronically imposed cellular limit weaving in & out of itself

            so that it alchemically transmutes eternity

 

/   /   /

 

Credit: “Anterior Cartography” from Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane). Copyright © 2022 by Will Alexander. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books. You may acquire a copy from the press by clicking here.

Contributor
Will Alexander

Will Alexander was born in Los Angeles in 1948 and published his first poetry collection, Vertical Rainbow Climber (Jazz Press), in 1987. His books include Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten (New Directions, 2021, a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist); Kaleidoscopic Omniscience (Skylight Press, 2013); The Sri Lankan Loxodrome (New Directions, 2009); and Asia & Haiti (Sun & Moon Press, 1995). Also known for his essays, plays, and nonfiction, he is the author of Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose Texts, Interviews, and a Lecture 1991–2007 (Essay Press, 2013), recipient of an American Book Award. He has taught at Hofstra University, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and the University of California, San Diego.

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