Atwood offers the reader little real solace through these confrontations with death. She retreats instead to the realm of imagination. The speaker in "Morning in the Burned House," the final poem in the collection, revels in the bizarre, hallucinatory state between life and death, imagined as a peaceful yet disquieting domestic scene:
In the burned house, I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house; there is no breakfast, yet here I am.
The spoon which was melted scrapes against the bowl which was melted also. No one else is around.
Where have they gone to, my brother and sister, mother and father? Off along the shore, perhaps.
This striking poem is the final realization of the book's rather cryptic title. In the end, the poet is left only with the "burned house" of her own, singular body, "holding my cindery, non-existent/radiant flesh. Incandescent.