after Kendrick Lamar’s “Untitled 05”

i opened the icebox, fished a pocket knife out of the tub of lard, and went off looking for the guy who owed me money. the heat wave’d burned itself out but the sky still smelled like piss, fields bleached for 40 acres on either side of the road. at the river crossing all the rats scrambled up the bilge of a coalship. that there were 42,951 structurally deficient bridges in the united states when i wrote this poem is relevant only insofar as i used it to externalize my fear. anyway, the guy'd stiffed me for a bottle of unisom that i'd said was vikes. i'd given him the month out to get me right and a season went by so there i was, idling outside the gas station where he clerked. went inside and his kid was on the counter, babbling like he was reading a tablet pulled out of a ruined temple so i bought a pack of mike & ikes and left. the road cut through the mountain like someone's dream of a straight line. i thought of my uncle, drinking in a field with a holy roller he’d lured off the doorstep before starting the ignition and driving his ford taurus into someone’s kitchen. holy roller died, uncle survived, and i spent five years in catholic school. deer crowded the guardrail like angels caught in the glow of a shotgun blast. i stopped at the dam. a loon skittered across the lake like a tallboy on a freeway. i threw my knife in and watched water crest over the embankment.

googled your name again to see if you're still alive. i’ve moved states twice but the bullet hole always ends up back in the front door. when a balloon popped next to the produce aisle i hit the floor, grapes spilling all around me like pearls snatched off a neck. give 'em enough time and most improbable things will happen; i was driving to joe's to give him the drugs when i saw our toddler wandering down the road, followed by a pride of lambs all named after you. after i smashed your lamp i blamed it on my unhappy childhood, to which you blamed your not having sympathy for my unhappy childhood on your unhappy childhood. late violets were blooming under the windowsill. on the ride back from the inpatient program you told me when you try to make all of suffering a metaphor it stops communicating anything. it takes more than martyrdom for most people to get remembered. in another timeline we're standing in the ruined city, only the city isn't ruined anymore. i've got the kid and you're holding a parasol, all of us watching a monkey dancing on top of a music box, the monkey watching the sea rise like a runaway loaf of sourdough. always easier to imagine life as better than it is, i suppose. your shadow's still roaming the apartment, rounding corners, filling mirrors. i turn around and there you are, wan in the refrigerator's light. our toddler's by the window, staring at us as they push over a table full of teacups.

streams in their originary culverts pulled coliform bacteria into the reservoir. i was sick with something i couldn't name. headlights cut through rain like moses parting the crowd at a methadone clinic. all sorts of things i could tell you. when i walked past the war memorial all the bloodroot turned their cocked ears. spotted salamanders made their yearly suicidal migration across rio road. someone told me the dope was bad. in the graveyard, i watched the marble-hewn names in their invisible dissolution. ivy swallowed the house they carried the woman out of. in my driveway, a man lay with his mouth open. vernal pools stocked themselves with woodfrogs. the landscape translated only roughly into the eulogistic mode. at dusk, their chorus like the crackling of distant fires.