Eric Sean Rawson, Door Bell (photograph)
A future sun will rise up in all its glory
so red and ravenous it devours the daytime sky,
matter ripping itself into sound and light
in one last explosion uncontainable as art itself.
Dying is an art, said Sylvia Plath,
dark energy providing the opposite of gravity.
Heaven performs a billion spectacular finales;
it’s up to us to conjure the rest.
We’d all start with divinity and work backwards
if we could manage the math
but even Lady Lazarus burned her miraculous hair
in the calculus of resurrection.
Here at the table, event horizon flickering pink,
we begin with a sense of the absolute:
the emperor of ice-cream, Mrs. Ramsay's charm,
and light, of course,
the way it always travels at light speed.
Everything else is contingency—
cutlery glinting like a phantom,
peaches in a milk white bowl, figs going bloody blue.