"An obscure darkness passes over me..."

An obscure darkness passes over me...
I feel death is my sister and friend, and I might clasp it to my breast, as I have clasped my sister and counted her breaths. The light presses on me like an insistent lover, dulls me, moves me to a hapless indolence. Death inures itself to me, protesting my life, which seems suddenly to be a stern figure in an ill-lit painting. Murmuring to me and with my sister's pale hands, death moves through a square arrested by snow, and I appalled by light am silent, am, in the opulent light, still.