Brown Miller's poem is a cry from someone shut out by a lover who no longer responds. The speaker remembers a time when the two crawled through the night "clinging to each other," but now everything points to distance. Again and again the poem says what the other person cannot do: see, hear, feel. Even the title, with its word "extermination," suggests the speaker has been wiped out emotionally, and cannot make sense of it.
The imagery is harsh and bodily. Dead animals lie at a door, a stare is a razor, bones cry out, and a name has "flesh" that is starving. These pictures make the speaker's hunger for connection feel physical and desperate. Love is called a "disease" that the two have used to strangle their own lives, so the blame seems shared, though the final lines return to the speaker alone outside the gate. The mood is bleak, raw, and full of unanswered longing.