Bronx Nekyia

The ghosts had left us. The trash & insulation strewn across the floor

were the cave paintings of addicts so lonely & dead

their only art became to trace the fate of all cities, as they gradually become grand,

empty & unknown. It seemed I had no choice

but to wait until the room reached outside of itself to pull in the dark,

like a sailor pulls a net from the sea,

the edge of the boat a tangible threshold, while the other threshold, the horizon

becomes one with the sky, a wall the ghosts peer through

like a child holding one eye to the bullet-hole

in the elevator door – black ripples in a wall of steel.

Long tired of cackled laughter, I now know why they close the eyes of the dead,

& why unknowingly, in some secret ritual, my mother kissed each eye

before I left – our boy, our beautiful baby boy.

There is a point when no guardian can explain the world & language reaches its end,

though nothing ends, & the child rides beyond the pitched horizon,

like a ship in the theory of an infinite fall.