Quasar

Janet Hagelgans

Among the living vastness, the last stars sigh
in fitful drifting, their only fuel the knowledge
that a light burns and sings and does not grieve for the years

until their fires
turn to tears and they wish again, in their fading,
to remember that light and energy were once one.

When he sings I experience every spirit
that once moaned through unnamed stellar cemeteries.
His vibrato glosses the curve
of seasonless space - diminuendos through the absolute zero

of breathless fog, and for an instant
becomes a lost memory in the frost.

In that song I recall the stars
that were forgotten, I realize dreams whose bodies
had fizzled in the dark.

In his voice glints
the shudder: a wavering of dying
and living things trying to break free, and within
his breath I sense the first air
of the forests being gasped into him at once.

He sings as though he knows the core
of the quasar, the burning and fusion of purposeless passion,
its intolerance, the velocity of galactic matter,
the bodiless photon; he fathoms the very motion of creating,
spinning gold into song.

And we, some lonely asteroids, float in orbit, endlessly,
around a nameless place - waiting
for the warmth of a distant light that draws no closer.