Father’s dead.
Now mother’s dying.
Our only child,
childless. And
so a filament
in the braided line
ends with us—
a faint whimper
in the vast, dark, inter-
stellar vacuum.
As one day too
it will happen that
transmissions
from a distant
Voyager or other
will no longer
fall on deaf ears,
for all ears will
have, like leaves
to loam, returned
(as the liturgy says)
to dust in one
grand whimper—
though, no question,
grand overstates
the scale of it.
Hard to avoid
hyperbole as
things are finally
about to end.
Mother’s down
to seventy pounds.
I’m down to believing,
against all odds
(and, you say,
common sense), in
the resurrection,
all things made new—
gold filaments
in the loose braid
of our brief
history of big ideas.