For Murray Hunter, M.D.

Hair and skin one whiteness, eyelids locked,his stillness is the stillness of the bedclothes;his words, not speech but systems emptying out:Death is taking back the small distinctionsbetween man and man and man and anything.Gone the treasury of signs and cures,the warrior ambition to better or sustain.Now only the heave of managed breath, the lispof oxygen, and the dry tears of vigil.Death, why do you trivialize your own lessonwith idiot repetition? Could you not giveeven so gallant an enemy his due:the coup de grace of massive stroke,the grudging favour of fatal accident?