Most poems about death look for something to hold onto: a memory, a legacy, a voice that outlasts the body. Q.R. Quasar's "Bhairavi in the Long Gone" removes every one of these. It imagines the far end of the universe, when the Cosmos has burned through its energy, matter has fallen apart, and nothing is left to mourn or even to notice. Its central idea is that extinction on this scale is not only the end of life but the end of meaning, because meaning needs someone to carry it.
The title gives a clue about the tone. Bhairavi is the name of a raga, and as I understand it, ragas of that name are often used to close a concert. It is also the name of a fierce goddess figure. Whether or not the poet intends both, the idea of a final piece of music fits the poem closely. The speaker says that "it matters not how oblong the song, / it will fade out, will fade, fade. . ." The song stands for the universe, and perhaps for the poem too. The word "oblong" is odd and comic, and it picks up the "long" of "Cosmos is long in time" and of the title's "Long Gone." That repeated sound makes duration feel heavy, then pointless.
The poem's boldest move is to treat the Cosmos as a body. It has "breath," it "heaved and heaved and heaved in fire," and now it goes "into coma." The capitalised "It" gives the universe a dignity close to a god's, which makes its dying more affecting. Against this, the physics vocabulary stays cold and exact: "lattices," "plasmas," "neutron," "quantum." The atoms are "dancing" at first, then "cold and numb." The poem keeps pulling between warm, human metaphors and the indifferent language of science, and the pull is where its sadness comes from.
The middle section is built on repeated negatives. "No mouth," "no machine," "no gas," "no atom," "no neutron": the list shrinks in scale as it goes, from human speech to technology to the smallest particles. Even the language of society and love fails. Atoms are no longer "attracted to other," and no neutron is "sovereign," a word that makes the particles sound like fallen rulers. "All uncouples in collapse" describes the end of the universe as a breakup. One detail stands out: the only thing that can't be passed on is the "meme," and the meme is "entropy." The idea that predicts this ending is erased by it. Idea and ending cancel each other out, and the irony is bleak.
The form carries the theme too. The poem is free verse with no regular rhyme or metre, but it uses ellipses, trailing dots and dashes as if the voice is thinning out. The odd punctuation in "pronounce:—" and "signify:-—" looks like a stammer or a glitch, as though even the text is breaking down. Then comes the refrain: "the bleakness blankets the darkness," "the bleakness blankets the home stretch," "the bleakness blankets final darkness." The heavy "bl" alliteration works like a blanket being pulled over, and the slight changes from line to line move us toward the finish. "Home stretch" is a surprisingly cheerful phrase for a race, and here it is drained of cheer.
The most memorable image is "no eyes left / to hear the mythical tree fall in quantum silence." It twists the old riddle about a tree falling unheard. Here the tree is "mythical" and the silence is "quantum," so philosophy and physics collapse into each other, and the senses are scrambled: eyes are asked to hear. Perception itself has gone, and it is hard to say what is left of the universe if no one is there to register it.
The poem ends on two words, "terminal nothingness," set apart and without a full stop. There is no consolation and no turn toward hope. Its significance lies in how it makes a very large, abstract idea feel intimate, using song, breath and partnership. It is also a little paradoxical, since the poem speaks from a point where speaking is impossible. That tension lets us hear, for a moment, the fade-out it describes.