The speaker describes dying at night and being scattered across the sky, and then tries to answer a question someone has asked: what was it like? The poem is written as a letter, so it feels like a private reply to a person who wants to know. The speaker admits that the hope of peace now seems like a joke, as hollow as a laughing figure at a fairground.
Another voice, "you," says the years from 18 to 22 matter most in a life. The speaker looks back at that time and finds one thing: waiting. Death, too, is described as waiting, underwater, "breathing blood." The dead, the speaker suggests, cannot touch or reach anyone, like creatures stuck in a spiderweb.
The mood is quiet, uneasy, and stripped down, with broken lines that mirror the scattered self. At the end the speaker refuses a final answer. Ask again after you have lived a second time, she says, and the answer will change, though the question stays the same.