Q.R. Quasar opens with a neat piece of arithmetic: I have two bodies. One is the ordinary kind that walks around and will wear out. The other is the Universe itself. The poem grows from this doubling, and its central idea is that death comes in two sizes. We die small, "by and by," and the cosmos dies large, "even more by and by." What could be a cold lesson in astronomy becomes closer to a family matter, because the second body is the one "we share."
The first stanza is quietly precise. The speaker moves *with* the local body but *in* the Universe, and that small switch of prepositions carries the whole difference between owning something and being contained by it. The word "motile" is almost laboratory language, yet "by and by" is homely, an old-fashioned way of saying "eventually" that sounds like something said over a fence. It also does the poem's only real rhyming, chiming with "die" and then repeating, so the second "by and by" feels like an echo that has travelled farther. The joke is that the phrase never gets longer, only the time it covers does.
Then the poem turns to "you," and the tone shifts from lecture to confidence: "didn't you know?" The Universe, we learn, "has a wailing home too," and the speaker piles up words for the sound of it: "moan," "shriek," and finally "the rising wave of the attenuated shriek." That last phrase is a nice contradiction. A wave that rises should grow louder, but "attenuated" means thinned out and stretched. Judging by the imagery, the sound is something huge and fading at once, as if the scream of the cosmos has been spread across so much space that it has become a kind of weather. Meanwhile the word "home" keeps recurring, "ancestral home and our future home," and sets its cosiness against the shrieking. The poem makes the unsettling suggestion that the thing we come from and the thing we end in are the same noise.
The two-line stanza that follows is the strangest in the poem: "outside of our instincts we can shudder / in our second home." Instinct belongs to the local body, which flinches and survives. To shudder *outside* instinct is to feel dread as an act of thought rather than reflex, which is only possible once you have taken up residence in the larger body. Right after this comes a wry admission: "of course art crumples in our home that crumbles." The near-rhyme of "crumples" and "crumbles" suggests a draft being balled up while the building falls down around it. The poem includes itself in the wreckage, and "of course" gives the loss a shrug rather than a lament.
The closing movement borrows the chant "ashes, ashes, we all fall down," which children know from a game that ends with everyone dropping to the ground. Quasar bends the line as it repeats it: first "we all fall off / the roaring edge," then "the sheer drop ledge," and only on the third try does it become "fall down." The falling gets steeper with each version. The final sentence then spills over several short lines, from "as one body, the Universe," through "the last, ultimate / tailspin down," to "the last unknown black hole." The aviation image of the tailspin sits oddly beside the astronomical black hole, giving the end both a human, machine-made panic and a cosmic scale. Throughout, the poem is free verse with lowercase line openings and almost no full stops, so it ends without a closing mark, as though the fall has not finished.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it makes cosmic death feel personal without softening it. Many poems about mortality stay inside a single life, while many about the cosmos forget that someone is doing the looking. By insisting on two bodies, Quasar lets private dread and astronomical fact speak in one voice. The unexpected comfort is in the pronouns, which move from "I" to "you" to "we." If we all die together as the Universe, then at that scale nobody dies alone. The comfort is thin, a wave "attenuated" almost to nothing, but the poem offers it.