The Distance Between Us
For the one I cannot reach and cannot release
“Out of sorrow entire worlds have been built / Out of longing great wonders have been willed” — Nick Cave, Are You The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?
In the years that lie between us, in the silence vast and deep, I have kept your name like embers that refuse to fully sleep, through the corridors of evening, through the hollow of the night, I have called across the distance; there has come no answering light. Yet I feel you in the autumn when the dying branches sway, and the world grows thin as paper at the edges of the day; there is something in the darkening, in the cooling of the air, that insists upon your presence – that insists that you are there. We were separated, slowly, by the ordinary years, not by fury, not by ruin, not by anything but fears, by the silences that gathered where the words had ceased to go, by the tide that parts two shorelines neither shoreline chose to know. I have measured all the distance in the hours before dawn, in the space inside the music where a single note is gone it is not so very far, love, by the reckoning of miles; it is infinite and airless in the reckoning of trials. For the body may be proximate and still the spirit mourn; one can stand inside a doorway and feel utterly forlorn distance is not made of oceans, it is made of what we keep, all the unspoken, unretracted, buried fathoms deep. So I love you from this distance, as the stars love what they burn, as the tide loves what it leaves behind with every dark return without hope of any answer, without waiting for a sign, only certain you are somewhere, only certain you were mine. And when at last I cease to call across the stretching years, it will not mean I have forgotten; it will not mean I have no fears it will mean the distance narrowed, in the only way it can: that I crossed without a crossing, to wherever you began.
Tamara — T;A
Tamara, this is so devastating in the most dignified way. You’ve written longing without melodrama, grief without spectacle, pure talent, just that steady ache that hums under the ribs and refuses to clock out.
What I admire the most is your restraint is that uou never blame the storm, you indict the silence. Most distances are drafts.
And those images, embers that won’t sleep, the missing note inside the music, the tide loving what it leaves, they embody absence.
God, how you’ve turned space into substance. Air into weight.
There’s also something philosophical here: proximity as illusion, separation as interior structure . Two people can share a doorway and still live on different planets. You make that truth feel both cosmic and intimate.
And that ending, “crossed without a crossing”, is transcendence. It suggests that some distances are closed by integration, by becoming large enough to hold what you cannot hold.
Sharp. Bright. Unafraid of stillness. Like your mind. The supernova mind.
Now you are just showing off! And it is utterly delightful :)
It was you who prompted me to try poetry as a spoken endeavour and here, entwined with your vocal presence, I can see why it is the preferred delivery mode.
It dances on lilts and runs, the expanding contracting cadence keeps twisting with the images you incant.
I am left with the imagery of the stars loving their celestial fuel as they continue to burn… we are, of course, star stuff. Perhaps we should consider being more like our forbearers in this regard? Love all that grants us energy… if only it were that simple.
I’m not sure what modern poetry looks like, but I’m glad I have had an occasion to enjoy this multi-modal endeavour.
Bravo :)))))