When I am ash, as is my wish,
take a stone out to the field for me
and leave it near the meadow wall
where it won’t jam machinery.

Nothing cut or polished. Something
tumbled down the stream and smoothed
by sand will do, the sort of stone
that’s been there all along. It’s just

that in the field tonight, I stopped
and stood among the cedars
and the hedgerow’s coils and twists—
the heart-shaped lump of a wasp nest

suspended from a branch above
my own dark shape— and the moon’s
unclouded eye fell on us all so equally,
it seemed as good a place as any I could be.

From Tips for Domestic Travel (Black Lawrence Press, 2009).
Used here with the author’s permission.