How does one approach the reading of a 300-page poem written in the voice of a hummingbird, “Concerning the Henbane Bird,” and in the kaleidoscopically refractive style of Will Alexander? Do we let it “wash over” us? Do we read with a dictionary at our elbow? What understanding—one might ask what cosmopolitics—anchor our own navigation of the work? This essay argues that the sense Alexander’s poetry makes is not singular but as variegated as the iridescence on a hummingbird’s gorget, a sense highly relational to the reader’s angle of approach. The poem’s cosmopolitics entails the differential becoming of humans and hummingbirds, across partially overlapping systems of vision and color relations, in a spectral dimension haunted by error and chimera, where it is precisely the “intra-active” gaps between our modes of perception that bind us. The poem thus proposes an ecology of listening, inviting us into modes of consciousness our threatened yet shimmering world needs us to find.