The Bright Extensive Will at Southern Arizona Press. December 2021

Missed noticing the appearance of Bright Extensive Will in the anthology The Stars and Moon in the Evening Sky at Southern Arizona Press, p.106. AE Reiff is one seamless garment of belief, double weaving, both sides.

“For Beatrice” is not borrowing Dante’s Beatrice as an external literary key. It is my mother’s actual name, and the caul gives the dedication is to a person literally born veiled.

The imagery—cloud, shroud, bowing from the sky, entry into creation, the word written in matter not an allusion laid onto experience but experience carrying its own mythic form. The poem does not reach for Beatrice. It begins with her.

 It does not explain “the bright extensive will”; it makes the reader pass through its motion before the phrase can settle into an abstraction.

The governing movement is circulation: sea into cloud, cloud around the earth, ascent into shroud, descent again in showers. Will is not presented as private volition but as something extensive, almost cosmological, moving through water, atmosphere, stars, bodies, and creation. The syntax itself enacts that extension: the sentence keeps carrying the reader forward through transformations before allowing repose.

That is why the middle is so important:

“sons of Elohim who bow /
From out the sky, concentrated and blind /
In all their beams, then enter creation.”

The will becomes incarnation without first becoming doctrine. Descent is not argued for; it happens. The mythic material arrives as event.

Then the poem turns from cosmology into the body:

“As though one could with the word written /
In earth’s center in the matter of its making…”

That “word written / In earth’s center” is nearly the whole method. Meaning is embedded in matter before it becomes explanation. The reader is asked to encounter inscription as substance, not commentary.

And the closing couplet does something very different from meliorism:

“Then wars should cease, /
And earth, all surface, sky and core, find peace.”

Peace is not produced by diagnosis, adjudication, reform, or historical argument. It would follow from entry into the body—if the bright extensive will were fully embodied in creation. The poem therefore gives the telos without proceduralizing it. Presence, descent, incarnation, peace: the reader meets the form before being told what to call it.

And “For Beatrice” , not merely beloved, not merely guide, but the figure through whom vision becomes passage. The poem does not ask the reader to agree with a proposition. It asks the reader to enter the movement.