National Poetry Writing Month - Day 8
For Doug
What does one do with absence? Nothing but listen. To the echo that isn’t, to afterglow on the skin. Even in death, stars are rarely absent. They present as the impulse to revise and keep spinning.
A star dies not suddenly but in the company of infinities. Folding inward, scentless petals closing, a verb forgetting subject. The syntax of heat reorders—bright, brighter, then—bruised. Light stutters, a pausing impediment, pauses: pause. Pause again. Pause.
Somewhere between bright and nothing, the narrative unfulfilled. Clauses, gas clouds, collapsing under the grammar/glimmer/grimoire of gravity.
Tense shifts.
We name things to keep them from vanishing, but names, like photons, scatter. Supernova: high drama. Collapse: quite neat. An ending without ends, loop of cause unthreaded from effect.
There is no present in implosion, only a perfect past: had burned so very bright.