"To fade, to dematerialize: foreordained." Doug Knowlton's poem opens by naming its subject, mortality, in abstract, almost clinical words, then spends its eighteen lines asking what a person can do about it. The answer is not rescue. The poem accepts that "no course" exists "but to accept moons / one after another, and their phases / to extinction." What it offers instead is a pair of small defences, love and writing, which can shape and delay the fading even though they cannot stop it.
The form carries much of the meaning. The poem is built from tidy two-line stanzas, but the sentences ignore them. "Accept moons" ends one stanza and "one after another" begins the next, so the reader is carried over the gap the way one moon replaces another. Two lines are left alone as single-line stanzas, which makes them feel weighty. One is "hatred may accelerate a prolonged passing." The other is "To write what remains to be written endures." In that second case the word "endures" ends its line and the stanza, and the next sentence only continues after a pause, so the form briefly does what the word says. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Instead the poem relies on stressed, heavy lines and mid-line stops: a colon after "dematerialize," full stops in the middle of lines, and fresh sentences beginning with "We," "Even so," and "Only." The repeated "Only" ("Only the way one leaves / preserves. Only love...") gives the middle of the poem the feel of a short list of rules.
The imagery moves between the cosmic and the bodily. The moons and "sunrise" belong to the sky, yet the poem pulls the reader down fast. "Sunrise brings regeneration // deterioration" is the most striking moment: the two words sit side by side with no "and" or comma between them, as if a new day renewing us and wearing us down were a single event. Then comes the bluntest phrase in the poem, "We rot upright, walking / toward release." Walking is ordinary and decay is grim, and the poem joins them. Yet "release" is a gentler word than "death," and the poem keeps hinting that the end may be a freeing as well as a loss. Even our bodies are softened into "clouds / of cellular matter made for transient music," which "recede for joining." The body becomes weather and sound, something that passes but is not nothing.
Knowlton's word choice also does a lot of work. Much of the vocabulary is Latinate and abstract ("dematerialize," "regeneration," "penultimate," "ethereal"), which gives the poem a hushed, philosophical tone. Against this, short words such as "rot," "alone," and "leaves" land hard. Sound patterns tie phrases together: the s-sounds in "savory sustenance" and "staircase spiraling through sealed floors" create a whispering effect, and "penultimate charm possessed to postpone" clicks along on its p's. The phrase "penultimate charm" is especially rich. Writing is second to last, just before the end, and a "charm" suggests both something pleasing and a spell or amulet held against harm.
Love and hatred are set against each other in a puzzling way. Love is "savory sustenance / of distinction," something that keeps a person distinct and so "guards inevitable going." Hatred, by contrast, "may accelerate a prolonged passing." The wording is dense, but the judging by the contrast suggests the poem sees how we are loved, and how we love, as shaping the manner of our leaving. That is the sense of "Only the way one leaves / preserves."
The ending turns inward and becomes less certain. Dread is called an "ill" only by those "outside our dim knowing," and the poem then offers two strange images of crossing over: an "ethereal / staircase spiraling through sealed floors" and a "one-lane bridge." The plural "we" has been dropped, and the speaker's "my being yearns / to cross." The poem ends with a "quest for final freedom" rather than a resolution.
That is why it is worth reading. It does not pretend death is small or comforting. It puts love and writing in front of it as real but limited shelter, and the poem itself, with its stanzas that lean into one another and its single lines that stand and endure, is an example of the writing it describes.