The Astronomer

Will they make a new star
when you ascend?

__
A hundred thousand vermillion lights
coalesce into a single vaporous husk; amber, obscured
by the dust of a thousand galaxies. Your eyelid is
peeled back by science. Your mind is a machine made to suffer
a million years of space, to see that dusky loop
of bright matter and burning gas, ever diminishing.
It will be yours: every quantifiable part. Apply your metrics
and inherit that distant galaxy. Your eyes will light on it
learning, finally, the softening heat of love.
That predictable arc, burning away, at a rate
which you can acknowledge but never really feel.
Why shouldn't you look on it with fondness,
you, who saw in that darkness what no other did?
In the cold faraway, something not even a child could wonder at:
you chose the dimmest point of light to love,
the faint, the fading.
Much easier than people, who are also fading,
their forms and their affections,
fast, faster still.