When I came to the new country, I traded my siege-craft for a dugout and 
a splintering oar, and I rowed downriver, toward the interior.
 
I didn’t know much about the innerlands then, but I knew about going, 
about wanting to be gone.
 
Once, I stopped for a week to trap pheasants and cut wildflowers for tea, 
to read the three books I had left to me, and to repair my body in the summer 
prairie.
 
On the morning I left, before pushing off from the rocks, I tempted a falcon 
with a scrap of rabbit meat to perch in my boat.
 
Afterward we traveled together, hooded and sleeping, or else in silent flight.
 
One year, we slept in the dented hull of a bus. The next an old hangar, 
scattered with bats.
 
Late in the winter, as the ice cleared from the river, we returned to the 
water to continue our drift.
 
Ashen, near ruin, like the burnt cities on the banks.
 
Which I named in passing, and forgot the next night.