Dave Bonta's poem starts with a bleak claim: the world we carry in our heads is false, like a stone a chicken swallows to help it digest. It is a substitute we mistake for the real thing. The speaker sets lovely details, like winter light and swelling maple buds, beside a newspaper story about a cruise-ship beach in Haiti, where tourists are never told where they are. That fake, walled-off paradise becomes a picture of how we experience everything. We ache for the world, yet we never know it.
The second section turns this around. The world knows us, reaches past our bodies, and even "seeds us with cities," which seems to mean the bacteria and organisms living inside us. When we die, they devour what is left. The final section is more playful and strange. The speaker says he takes his "own sweet time," then imagines two facing mirrors and a tunnel of reflections. At its end sit darkness and "a hint of stars." The mood moves from longing and unease to a wry, quiet wonder.