How strangely she moved
between shadow and light
in the thin hollow air
wingless and eyeless
on the edge, the very edge,
of death.

I watched her hang
cruelly in the sky
wondering then and now
why she was smiling.

As the seconds passed
each more thunderous than
the last, she faded,
skin disappearing from bone
muscle separating from tendon
her genitalia
a darkening hole.

In the end, only her sigh
remained to remind me
of her short, uncomfortable life
completed in the coldness
of incomplete night.