On a warm day you burn brands into long boards of cedar

logged in Idaho which is that big chimney of land

that you passed through on the way to Washington, another made up place

on the way to dying

which, you know, on the way there

there were times in your life where you felt the whole mouth

of it open against you,

the whole pleasure of having a body,

which there are many ways to know, and one of them

is lying naked in a hot spring with your friends and acquaintances, new birds

you've never even heard before some of them, none of them,

actually not even these particular blue jays

cackling in the high fine needled trees.

So you can say you've been to Idaho!

Here on the east coast these cedars

are shaved down to angles. You affix them

to each other where they'll stay until they rot 

back to the earth they still have faces for:

holes from bugs burrowing, tesselations from brief lives 

growing up up up out on the farm. Don’t know but I imagine it was quiet there until the end.

Here it's quiet too, for DC, who’d believe it? Deer

in their long coats don't mind you, and the cars

are far enough away to sound like one long wave meeting the shore

forever and never returning. You've heard all this before,

these crows and blackbirds, and an eagle who lives up there in the brush. 

Not the buck screaming run to its herd, from the grasses, but all the rest of it:

the wind in the small trees, dead vines soughing on the chain link, car horns,

your own hairs bowed against your collar like a million chewing mandibles, what's new? The world 

closes its mouth around you, sucks you like a stone.