Photograph of a Late Poet

Stranger to me, even then he was unworlding —
not as you are, in whom death hangs
motionless, lazily finning barracuda-fashion,
but swiftly, as coffee subverts a sugar lump,
infiltrating him while he posed even, crumbling
the cooling fingers around the still warm pipe.
Like the woman camera-caught in the morning papers
midway down from parapet to concrete
he is held falling in this imponderable half-life
as though at swordpoint over a black blood trench
across which I can only stammer the usual riddle:
Did having dealt a lifetime with this matter
make those minutes easier when in the brain space
collapsed upon itself, then rived apart,
supernova, throat turned sphincter? Posed, frozen,
the eyes like poems smile and answer nothing.