This Is Death

Home again;
the place stinks of dead.
I discover a rat
under my bed.
It is light as paper
and leaves puffs of soft fur and skin
strewn around the floor like bulrush fluff.
The cast has been cut from my arm,
the limb a corpse belonging to someone else,
the muscles wasted, tendons rigid with a kind of dying.
Layers of skin waft through the stale air,
like desiccated snowflakes, defying gravity-
a waterless snowstorm in a dry and airless globe.
If this is death, I tell myself…
then it is as weightless as a dandelion clock;
as painless as a dead bird’s flightbone,
hollow and full of sunlight.