Most poems of address speak to someone who is present, or at least once was. Q.R. Quasar's poem speaks to readers who do not yet exist and whose "forms in vibrance" the title admits we "cannot yet imagine." Its central idea is a bold emotional wager: if we can already love those future beings, they must be able to love us back, even across a gulf of time so large that "we cannot count the years."
The poem opens with the vocabulary of cosmology and then turns it into a problem of communication. The Universe "goes through phase change," and "sound and letters get lost / in the longer and longer wavelengths / of spreading void vastness." The image is of meaning stretched thin the way light stretches as space expands. The worry that follows is clever: perhaps humans simply "live too fast" for our "far inheritors to hear/see our wavelengths of meaning." The slash in "hear/see" shows the speaker unsure which sense will even apply. By the third stanza the worry has become a task. We must "translate our fast lives" into something the future can "absorb / and grow on," a phrase that treats a message as food, something that nourishes rather than merely informs.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre, and that suits a speaker who is thinking aloud and groping. Its structure comes from repetition. "The scope is daunting" opens the first three stanzas, like a person returning to the same cliff edge. The first stanza also stacks its parallels, "infinite in question; infinite in time; infinite in space," and then undercuts the grandeur with a small, human question: "what can we say?" Dashes and parentheses interrupt the lines throughout, so the poem hesitates and corrects itself. The most obvious correction is "let me restate this," a very plain, spoken phrase placed just before the ending.
The key word in the poem's one gentle surprise is "pregnant." Mystery is called "pregnant, infinite in question," and the metaphor quietly anticipates the subject of the poem. The unknown is full of something not yet born, and so are the future beings the speaker addresses. This connects to the poem's most striking line, that we "thought their love before they lived." Love is imagined here as an act of thought that can come before its object exists, so affection runs backwards through time.
The argument turns in the fourth stanza. "Perhaps we are meaningless to them: / I do not think so." The speaker doesn't prove this. He simply asks, twice, "how could they not love us," and the question carries the whole case. Even the bleak admission that these future beings will roam the Universe "isolated as they must be—like us all" works in the poem's favour. Isolation becomes the thing we share, not the thing that divides us.
The last two lines change the pronoun, and the change matters. Until then the future has been "they" and "them," a distant third party. In the restatement it becomes "you," and the poem finally speaks to its title's addressee. The word "now" is set in quotation marks, as if the speaker doubts that a shared present exists across such distances. The final line, as printed, reads "Jove you" rather than "love you." That may be a slip, but it may also be a deliberate coinage, since Jove is the old name of the sky-god. Either way the odd word makes the closing declaration sound a little startled, as if the speaker had surprised himself.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it matches big physics with a small, stubborn feeling. It does not claim to know what the future holds. It admits being daunted three times before it commits to hope, and that admission makes the hope more convincing than confidence would. It also gives a fresh way to think about the old human wish to be remembered: the speaker wants to love the people of the future, not only to be remembered by them.