A Sentence about a Sentence I Love

With so many worthy sentences in the realm of the sayable, with so many great sentences already loved and savored in this series — I, nearly at random, cracked open Will Alexander’s The Sri Lankan Loxodrome (New Directions, 2009), the latest volume by one of our premier neo-surrealists, and immediately found myself in the midst of this marvelously manic monologue, of this ecstatic accretion of clauses, of this dramatic flurry of draw-dropping diction, of this intense and itinerant imagination, of what Andrew Joron has appreciatingly called “a new glyph of meaning,” of what Harryette Mullen has aptly termed “a complex sentence machine”:

I execute at random
perhaps
as a sun-engrained scholar
or perhaps
with the psychic limitations of a strident vertiginous pronoun
studded with acquisitive majesty
for the one spinning day
near the 5 ghostly fragments around the sun

& I’ve named these fragments
according to their upper or lower arboreal declaration
according to the way they face the earth
according to the nectareous condition of the motion of the mind
being always jeopardous
murky
typhlotic

yet I can see
I am photopic
I am able to breath blood
I know the “Southwest Monsoon Current”
I know the “Central Indian Ridge”
I know the nautical forms from the “Arabian Coast”
absorbing my visions from the “Tibetan Plateau”

& so the Weddell Sea
or the Greenland Current
mean nothing to me
except
as extrinsic distraction
5,500 meters from my aura

yet I always think of waters from heaven
of aeronautical carbon
of a halo of meteors