The visitation here is from my deceased parents.
"Night Festival."
"To reach the night festivities, I press against the celebrants
an abbreviated symmetry with me at the lower end
of the hill in a synthesis, a corporation, an exile of bodies
and dangers I fear, who know I have
no business on this premises.
Or I fail to comprehend the intimation of despair.
Or I belong to no undercurrent of the circumstance.
Or what I draw instead now the universal grid, now
a pixelated vista.
Configures no permission, even as the mob begins to dissipate.
And there is my father, with his remorse imposing as the Andes
above the great mountain savanna.
His innermost ensemble of cells, my father, his subordinate
and metallurgical heartache, all the microtones
of Bogotá 17th locality of my father's amphibian
electrocardio dissection, alien puppetry.
His Gaspard de la Nuit late lesson of his road
mirage science.
He says, I'm homesick for the material contradiction
of our kin.
Among the living long after the land overcame my conformity,
but please spare this from your mother,
from her propensity to disappear over time.
Her four cardinal points in rapid alteration.
Her lofty decibels and coffee milk austerity saltine.
Her solitude in newsprint apocalypse or index cards.
Her Billy the Kid, Salon Mexico, Wilshire Ebell,
Pedro Armendáriz, Yucatán Peninsula, reclusive close-up--
¿qué hora es?
My father says, apúntalas, the words "ignominy"
and "escrow," too late or unspecified on the subject
of wake time surrender, phosphorescent
in the dimming light of extrasensory encircled body
before, body after.
I had for my heart a perfect measure
to justify the untimely turn of my neither known,
never noiseless, and I had from my heart in the age of consent,
a little loathing.
I had a coin that fit the slot.
I had my compound fracture, declension of pain,
and deflated lung irregularities of color.
But I know now the mistakes of my ancestry
and the style of my birthday venipuncture,
and poultice for my chest infection in the slide
transparencies of my naked limbs and chickenpox
that foretold the phlebotomy of all Erie County.
I had now in my ventricles the great nebula of forgetting,
and the abrogated law no longer larger than life."