on watching another family watch the solar eclipse

it's just alright, i guess. the sun looks like a cosmic fingernail clipped out of a magazine—in an ad, an angel stands near naked selling anything but her body, fog- machine clouds a rolled scroll over her flesh; in this fake twilight, spots in my vision as bad as the man who looks a little like my dad, who walks into a parked car, mumbles oh shit with conviction reserved for the slatted half-light of a confessional booth or the dusty-partial-dusk of post-sex cold-sweat, desire eclipsed some unshakable shadow picked at like a scab, curiosity = idol, never a temple, like where ancient peoples worshiped under union of moon & sun, their children dancing like the children here in the lawn, bursting with strange energy coming from Dad’s face squinting up but there's absolutely nothing, because 93% union like 93% forgiveness results in partial cover-up, in tiny light crescents of sun on clothes & underneath them, right down to the split seams of when & where— who & why—why try to lay with a burning body 96 million miles out of range? we stare & speculate, but no one not scolding father nor scalded kids can quite see the thing itself, & i wonder: could the worshippers tear eyes away from the impossible to understand—did anyone not go blind from looking