Still Life With Gratitude Poem by Dean Rader

The heavens call to you and revolve about you,
showing to you their eternal beauties;
and your eye is still gazing upon the earth.
—Dante, Purgatorio


ONE DAY, the scientists tell us, every star in the universe
will burn out, the galaxies gradually blackening until


the last light flares and falls returning the all to darkness
where it will remain until the end of what we have come


to think of as time. But even in the dark, time would go on,
bold in its black cloak, no shade, no shadow,


only the onward motion of movement, which is what time,
if it exists at all, really is: the absence of reversal, the sheer


impossibility of that final fire dying into itself,
dragging the day deep into what it no longer is,


bowing only to rise into the other, into a shining
the heavens were commanded to host, the entire


always poised between the gravity of upward and downward,
like the energy of a star itself constantly balanced between


its weight straining to crush its core and the heat of that
same core heaving it outward, as though what destroys


redeems, what collapses also radiates, not unlike
this life, Love, which we are traveling through at such


an astonishing speed, entire galaxies racing past,
universes, it is as if we are watching time itself drift


into the cosmos, like a spinning wall of images
already gone, and I realize most of what we know


we can't see, like the birdsong overhead or the women
in China building iPhones or the men picking


strawberries in the early dawn or even our sleeping
sons in the other room who will wake and ask


for their light sabers. Death will come for
us so fast we will never be able to outrun it,


no matter how far we travel or how heavily
we arm ourselves against the invisible,


which is what I'm thinking, Love, as I watch you sleep,
knowing the iron in the blood that keeps you alive


was born from a hard star-death somewhere in the past
that is also the future, and what I mean to say


is that I am so lucky to be living with you
in this brief moment of light


before everything goes dark.