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At the End of Life, a Secret | The Poetry Foundation

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Share Everything measured. A man twists a tuft of your hair out for no reason other than you are naked before him and he is bored with nakedness. Moments before he was weighing your gallbladder, and then he was staring at the empty space where your lungs were. Even dead, we still say you are an organ donor, as if something other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet are regular feet. Two of them, and there is no mark to suggest you were an expert mathematician, nothing that suggests that a woman loved you until you died. From the time your body was carted before him to the time your dead body i

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