Death at Home

I entered the silent house
and saw my sister in the kitchen,
brooding over tepid dishwater, sipping beer,
slipping away from her pain,
as her children, in the dusky back room,
door ajar, stroked his hair and gazed
in wonder at this spent, peaceful man,

and there I saw it,
the detritus of cancer,
spent oxygen bottles, bedpans,
unused morphine patches,

and there I felt it,
his quietus
filling the room,
thick, cutting, invisible
insistent.

So silently I took my nephews
back to the kitchen
and together we wondered
at how 64 years of living ends

on a gurney,
in a shrouded bag,
rolling roughly past his rosebushes,
past his silent truck,
past his whimpering dog,
to a plain,
white
van.