By now I know pieces
have broken loose and slammed into
the sandbar across the channel
drifted, spinning crazily down
to Edwardsville where
splinters have pierced bottom
silt like toothpicks, pine and maple,
oak from the cabinets.

Nail holes bloated
like mouths of dead fish
filled by detritus from this
river until they are not
holes at all but whole walls
become from the void.

Drywall plaster, dissolved from
paper boundaries stream past
in a chalky slurry, striping blackened
driftwood. Whirls colloidal in backwater
vortex: a smear on the fish’s eye.

Linoleum’s eight patterns gone
to shapeless pigments and with it
footfalls’ echoes now lodge with ice
floes somewhere below St. Joe. Shingle
and finish nails, screwshank and concrete
rust through galvanic dip to return to
first minerals. Wall and rafter long
parted within the muffling silence of

roiling water. Rolled roofing gone smooth
as giant catfish; aspahlt grains sloshed
like placer pannings spewed from the filter
feeders, gar and pike; wedged in new willows
warping grain. Window glass ground down
to sand and with it, reflections drowned
with the unnumbered. Voices, slid from all
those surfaces, caught as echoes in the Gulf:
messages without bottles from this Kansas River
flowing where my father’s cabin used to be.