This is the sun for some of us, a still photograph
of a whole movie, with the shutter all the way
open at first, and closed again at the end,
so the brightness of absolute presence
confines itself to a host of parallelograms.

Several screens tessellate along the horizon 
in the dark. White on white, the clouds singing
and rubbing their hands together for sound,
the white blimp going over against them whose
white is gray shadow against them, slow
over Vineland Drive-In. 

One couple in Concessions hugs back to front,
her back to his front, and between the railings
they lumber like one slow tottering animal,
her belly-full-of-baby honing in on the popcorn person
who ladles a shocking stream of butter.
I can hear them smiling as they talk. I’m thrilled
to be here off the freeway, inside the light industrial parks
and strip clubs surrounding the city,

and I have been here before, at a carnival
where I came to see a two-headed baby
in a red velvet tent of his own. Like now,
a man sat on a stool at the entrance,
not taking his eyes off the television
balanced on a bar stool, and inside the tent,
a bulging sixteen-year-old stood beside me,
her hands up under her belly, as she looked
so close at the prodigy inside the jar
I thought she was going to bump her nose.

The infant had all of his eyes shut,
his little fingernails pressing against the glass,
and his skin had tufted up like cotton, lifted
around his spine, in a darker tint that suggested
bone rather than skin, and I could see fine gold hair
standing out on his arms and legs.
The pre-birth cilia covered him.
The hair on both heads was also gold,
and curly.