Bouquet at the End of the Universe

The eighteenth century still life
That is the bouquet on our kitchen counter
Lets fly a tuft of petals,
Thrown, jettisoned
As if the rest of the bunch had simply
Had it with them.
Did I see and hear this enactment of tiny ruin
Or did their fall attoseconds 
Before move my head
To witness the effects and not the act?
And no other movement or sound but
The stolid house-hum,
Its whispered continuance even when
We don’t notice.
And a building register among the quiet,
Not sound but the approach of it:
The sound nothing makes before the 
Blast of arrival—
Then what I hear, or imagine inhabiting
Some farness ahead,
Benjamin’s angel-rush: equilibrium fixing things
(or not) Slowing the star-burns
Calming the air streams into
Another silence, this one after
All celestial bodies have
Exhausted any possible way of 
Noise, when cold has muted 
The buzzing of quarks and 
Smaller things all,
All 
So peremptory is the 2nd Law,
And there are no more petals and 
No counters to receive them, 
That sound which no eardrum anywhere 
Shall catch.
Might some greater eye
Mark and hold dear 
Our universal acts,
Register as in
A musty ledger 
Our effects? Had we any?
And, were there,
In that nothing-dark,
How see?

Derek Davidson is an Assistant Professor at Appalachian State University. Previously he was Associate Artistic Director and Resident Company member at the Barter Theatre in Virginia. His solo piece Furrow, had its NYC premiere in 2020 as part of the NYC New Works Festival. His short play Blackjack has been performed internationally as part of the 2019 Climate Change Theatre Action, and was subsequently published as part of Lighting the Way: An Anthology of Short Plays about the Climate Crisis. Most recently, his play Talkback premiered at The Tank in August of 2022 in New York City.