The Wrong Corpse

She’s smartly pressed, flat, sad,
leaning her head on the wind,
doffing her new hat at failure
to keep someone alive long enough
to weep for her, buy a pinstripe
suit, march across crunching gravel.

Trees snap bare branches, click
their fingers to halt her sideways drift.

Who dressed her? It was someone
in the mirror; they poked lipstick
at her frozen mouth... pointed out
the twist of fate that holds a creaking
gate shut to make way for sudden
death. Eventual gets there in the end.