Uncle Vik calls and tells me
I better drive home. It’s winter.
I’m in Bowling Green, Ohio,
a rented room in a hotel-cum-apartment
that once housed a renegade Pretty Boy Floyd—
or maybe they just said that
to sell me on the place.
Fraught concept. Fraught place. Home,
those post-industrial riverain suburbs
south of Detroit.
Call him an uncle, call him a friend
of my parents dating back
to the antehistorical times
prior to my birth, the glacial times
of glacial muck, terminal moraine, heaven.
Old Uncle Vik, a good man with a good heart,
had just hung up with my mother
who was in an undisclosed place.
I think you better come home.
And discover what there is to see
of what’s been altered irrevocably.
He says her speech was garbled
from an attempt with pills. Her major organs
would soon be shutting down.
To complicate matters, my best friend Jim
had gotten arrested for driving drunk
out of the apartment lot.
A cop brought him to my door
shortly after the phone call after the phone call.
A favor, the cop explained.
He could’ve kept Jim in the drunk tank
until Monday. I’m confident
Jim would have made it to Detroit safely
if they hadn’t stopped him.
It’s a ponderous story involving
two too many drinks, two
too many characters, one
too many settings remote and vague,
reclaimed marshland from Rockwood
to Dayton, marshland that like a kidney
once strained agricultural runoff
before it hit the lake. My mother’s still here,
doing these kinds of things.
They found her a couple days later
in her red Ford Focus
behind a motel in Gibraltar.
She’d driven her car slowly, unseriously
into a copse of trees.