The poem begins in the middle of a thought. "6.8" looks like a section number, and the opening "And if" suggests we have walked into an argument already under way. Judging by the form alone, this may be one piece of a larger sequence, but the eleven lines hold together as a small drama of their own. The speaker weighs two ways of facing death. In the first, death is a relief, "to move / from the ugliness of this world." In the second, if that escape is refused, death should come gently, "with the singing / of one lone bird, at twilight." The central idea is a double wish: let dying be an exit, and if it can't be, let it at least be tender.
That structure of "if... then let it be," followed by "But if this cannot be / then let it die," gives the poem a quiet, bargaining logic. The phrase "let it be" is almost casual, as if the speaker were shrugging. Yet the second "be" arrives in the negative ("cannot be"), and the shrug turns into pleading.
The middle of the poem is its strangest and most interesting stretch. The syntax loosens: "should I / welcome spring; turn summer down, and fall / from my hands." There is no question mark, so we can't be sure whether this is a question, a vow or a daydream. The word "fall" works as both a season and a verb, so autumn slips from the speaker's hands like something dropped. Semicolons carry the sentence along instead of full stops, and the effect is of a mind drifting from one image to the next without settling.
The images are vivid and oddly chosen. There is "the serpent's slow unwinding, agate eyes, and blue bushes now / in flower." The serpent is sinuous and dangerous, and it may faintly recall a garden story, though the poem never says so. Its "agate eyes" are hard, banded and stonelike, beautiful and unreadable at once. The "blue bushes" are unnaturally coloured, as if seen in a heightened or dreamlike state. Then the poem grows richer still: "spice smells undo the lament / of tree leaves on the cement." Here the sensory world pushes back against sadness. The fallen leaves "lament" on a hard city surface, and the scent of spice undoes that grief. The poem never says whether these pleasures are what the speaker would give up in death or what might make life bearable. That ambiguity is the point. The "ugliness" of the first line is concrete, literally cement, but beauty keeps leaking in around it.
The sounds follow the same uncertainty. There is no regular metre or rhyme scheme, and the lines vary wildly in length. The long fifth line sprawls, crowded with stressed syllables ("agate eyes, and blue bushes now"), and then the poem snaps shut into short, plain phrases. One faint chime does appear: "lament" at the end of one line and "cement" at the end of the next, a near-rhyme that links sorrow to the hard city ground.
The ending is where the poem lands most softly. The speaker has used "I" and "my hands," but the last line widens to "us": "crook the hand, crawl over, cover us with leaves." Three quick commands, with no stated subject, could be addressed to death, to the bird, or to the world itself. The gesture of a crooked hand beckons, and the crawling echoes the serpent's slow movement earlier. Most movingly, "leaves" returns. Earlier the leaves lay lamenting on the cement, and now they become a blanket, so the thing that mourned is made into the thing that shelters. The poem closes on that image of burial as covering, not violence.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to settle on a single attitude toward death. It does not pretend that dying is simply beautiful, and it does not pretend that life is simply ugly. The speaker is tired of the world but still pulled by its smells, colours and small birdsong. In just a few lines, Wieners lets despair and appetite for life sit side by side, and the ending suggests that even a wish to leave can be made gentle by something as small as a bird at twilight.