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.