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.
“Most distances are drafts”… that’s the line I wish I’d written. There’s an entire essay living inside it: the idea that estrangement is rarely final, rarely even intended, just a version we kept failing to revise until revision became impossible.
The philosophical turn you take, proximity as illusion, is one I find genuinely unsettling in the best sense. We’ve built entire civilisations on the assumption that presence means something, that showing up constitutes a form of love. But the doorway image came precisely from that suspicion, that location is among the least reliable measures of closeness we have. Two people can be geographically inseparable and spiritually unreachable.
“Becoming large enough to hold what you cannot hold” ….. yes! That’s the only crossing available to most of us. Not resolution. Not reunion. Expansion. The one that doesn’t solve the loss but makes you a large enough vessel that the loss stops defining the edges.
Supernova mind, a star that gives everything and leaves something denser behind…. THAT is quite a compliment!
Thank you, Clara, for bringing your own brilliance to the reading! It showed.
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.
Sagan’s “star stuff” is usually invoked as consolation… we are vast, we are connected, but stars are also profligate, catastrophically generous, burning themselves into darkness for the sake of the light they cast. That’s not simple at all!!! That’s the most demanding love there is: the one love that gives without ledger-keeping, without the reasonable expectation of return. We romanticise it precisely because we can’t quite manage it.
As for modern poetry, much of it has traded music for gesture, the lyric line for the significant pause. There’s interesting work being done, but I’ll confess the forms that move me the most are still the ones that remember poetry began as song, not statement.
That you came to this through the spoken voice and found your way, that also delights me, Adam!
Consolation? I see star stuff as lineage. The cosmos was once one, now in endless forms (most beautiful) we see the separation and a severing from the one great singularity as a distant potential… as star stuff that distant potential collapses to a version of now with better, more cosmic proprioception.
Lineage rather than consolation changes everything. Consolation looks backward, softens a wound. Lineage implies inheritance, obligation even, a thread you’re responsible for carrying forward. We didn’t just come from stars; we are what the cosmos is doing with itself in this particular moment, feeling its own edges from the inside.
The universe knowing where its own limbs are… physics becoming self-aware. And if separation is the mechanism by which the singularity develops that awareness, then distance is how the whole learns to sense itself.
Which loops back, strangely, to the poem. Perhaps all longing is the cosmos reaching for its own coherence.….
This is majestic and poetic… very much in keeping with my understanding of divinity and even the soul… the universe witnessing itself both in vision and feeling (that proprioception I mentioned seems to have landed for you :)) is the thread that I perceive weaving through all of us. That lineage connects all to that notion in biology of a Last Universal Common Ancestor and for me that longing and that seeking for that original progenitor, nestled in the distant past and within the stars at the formation of the universe, this is where the sacred lives.
Feeling its own edges from insight… inside… yes… seeing the limits gives shape to existence… even if that shape looks to be limitless.
I’m sorry! Your poetry has me remarking on some rather deep aspects of my view of nature and divinity. Though, I feel confident that this was your intention!
Never apologise for going deep! That’s exactly where poetry is supposed to take you, and if it doesn’t, something has failed. The surface is for prose.
The Last Universal Common Ancestor as sacred origin, LUCA as a kind of secular genesis, is a genuinely beautiful convergence of the biological and the theological. What fascinates me is that longing, in this framing, is the universe’s own gravitational memory, the pull back toward a coherence it has been elaborating away from ever since. We don’t long because we are broken. We long because we are made of something that was once whole and hasn’t forgotten!
Seeing the limits gives shape to existence, of course! The finite is not the opposite of the sacred. It may be its most precise expression. A God without edges would be indistinguishable from nothing.
Your proprioception landed and kept expanding. That’s the best thing a good image can do. And you are a master of it.
Oh, but of course, the finite gives shape to everything on all levels—from quants to the cosmos. I’ve always enjoyed thinking of this in terms of cycles in nature, birth and death, seasons giving way to seasons, the end of your favourite book/movie/album, your career, each limit break imbues the story with a fully formed arc and that’s where meaning can be truly divined. And sacred, in its most fundamental form, is that which is separate… we have an itch to seek that which transcends this to something divine. Which sounds awful lot like how you described the “genuinely beautiful convergence of the biological and the theological.
My intuition (if you’ll permit me a little bit of speculation) is that notion you alluded to “we don’t long because we are broken. We long because we are made of something that was once whole and hasn’t forgotten!” That tension that tugs us towards the sacred, towards that which was once whole, or the universe’s own gravitational memory, these are impulses that keeps us seeking the ineffable. Which may look like seeking god, unity, transcendence… a kind of sacred striving.
And just one more layer deep (because you asked!) there is a sneaky double-bind that seems hardwired into the “shape of existence”: if we came from one and maintain that lineage, but can’t use our faculties to fully explain that desire to commune with the divine, and yet we still strive for reconciling that sacred “itch”… well that shape ensure that we continue to seek. Always seeking, you will never be able to hold it. And that can be overwhelming… until, perhaps, you realize that which we seek is here… in every moment that we take our discernment from mind to body and back again. That ineffable, sacred, universe’s-own-gravitational-memory, that divinity lives here… before concepts. Always ineffable, never graspable… perfectly so. Because even if you glimpse the sacred it will slip through your fingers. And thus you keep going.
Distance can be sustained by silence, but also maintained by decision. The “ordinary years” and “fears” you describe are choices repeated over time. Love does not erode by accident. It is deferred, postponed, rationalized. And that makes your final gesture—“that I crossed without a crossing”—even sharper. The only real crossing available is internal: the choice to release what fear once preserved.
Your poem is the strongest where it is precise rather than abstract, when distance becomes “the space inside the music where a single note is gone”. That image proves your control. You tell us the absence hurts; you show us the shape of what’s missing.
What a formidable anatomy of avoidance. And that honesty is what makes it resonate, Tamara.
Fear presents itself as weather, something that happens to us, but you’re right that it operates through decisions, small and repeatable, each one feeling too minor to count until the accumulation is irreversible. The ordinary years are ordinary precisely because no single one of them looked like the year everything changed.
The musical image came from a very specific experience of hearing a familiar piece and sensing something structurally wrong before identifying what, the absence had a shape before it had a name. That’s what this loss feels like to me. Not the note itself but the negative space it leaves in the pattern.
“Anatomy of avoidance” is more precise than what I managed to say about my own poem.
Thank you, Alexander, for reading with a critic’s eye rather than just a reader’s heart! Both matter, but they don’t always arrive together.
This is breathtaking. The restraint of it, the steadiness, the way you refuse melodrama and instead let the ache speak in a quiet, unwavering voice, that’s such a hard balance to achieve. Lines like “distance is not made of oceans, it is made of what we keep” are sublime.
What moves me the most is how gently you treat the separation. You don’t blame. You don’t dramatize. You name fear, silence, time, the ordinary erosions that so often undo us, and that feels devastatingly honest. It made me think about how many of our great losses are not explosions but weathering.
Sometimes distance is also a form of protection. We keep someone at a distance because love is too powerful to survive mishandling.
I love that you suggest that some reunions happen in consciousness, in surrender, in whatever lies beyond the measurable.
Thank you for writing something so tender and intelligent, Tamara. I love your poetry.
The distinction you draw between explosions and weathering is one I want to keep. Catastrophic loss has its own grammar, it has a before and after. But the slow type, the one my poem is about, leaves no clean edge. You don’t know it’s happened until you reach for something that’s no longer there. Grief without incident is almost harder to justify to yourself, let alone to anyone else.
The reunion in consciousness… I believe in that more than I probably should admit. The measurable world is not where the most important things happen. It’s where they leave their marks.
Thank you, Céline, for reading with so much tenderness!
Tamara, you stand out as such a beacon of unflinching honesty in the explorations of both the personal and societal. I don't often comment, because it seems superfluous, but rest assured I always look forward to your messages from the depths of unrelenting enquiry. I have a question. What age were you when you encountered English?
Sometimes the poem has done its work when it leaves the reader without recourse to language. That silence is the rarest review. Thank you, Andrew, for offering it anyway!
There’s nothing clumsy about a poem that tells the truth, form follows courage, and you had the harder task: writing toward something still unresolved rather than back at something survived.
Thank you, Lorne, for trusting your own words here first, and then finding something of yours in mine!
To be pulled beneath the sublime surface of your written and spoken words. Having the deepest secrets of one's heart teased to a roaring memorial flame.
Such enchantment is uniquely yours and not to be missed.
This sonnet, this timeless echo, is both thorn and suave but nourishing above all.
Thank you for presenting the ache we never quite forget, with such beauty.
Thorn and salve simultaneously… that’s the only beauty worth trusting. The purely comforting poem flatters; the purely wounding one merely performs. What lives between them, what catches and then holds, is the rarer thing.
That the ache is nourishing rather than merely painful… I believe that. Some feelings we carry because they’re load-bearing. They hold something essential in place.
Thank you for receiving it with such an open chest! I am moved.
Beautiful, "A Calling Across Forever," of soul to soul, in this lifetime and its proximate; for what is romance but an heroic endeavor above the ordinary day, to unite the seemingly impossible come what may. The wonderful rhyming couplets, give form to this expression perfectly!
Thank you Tamara, the muse has its way, in showcasing what you say, true to the depths of love's emphatic identity with the other. Bravissimo!
Romance as heroic endeavour, that reframing lifts it out of sentiment entirely and places it where it belongs: in the category of things that require courage rather than feeling. The ordinary day is not the enemy of love but its constant test, and most love fails through a slow failure of nerve.
The muse, when it arrives, is less inspiration than demand. You comply or you don’t. This one insisted.
Absolutely, Tamara, the ordinary day is the hinge upon which the miracle Play of Life manifests. Romance in this regard is above the mimesis of our everyday expectations.
The exception of Romance proves the rule, as the normative performance structures of our social world serves as the backdrop to the figurative dance of love in our private lives, and where, in the experience of all the ironies and mythical dimensions coming through the events of the ordinary day, we are able to reach for the ultimate significance of the sacred found in our interior landscapes of soul.
The hinge image is exact, not the grand occasions but the daily rotation, the small repeated movements that either open or close a life. And you’re right that romance derives its charge precisely from that contrast: it wouldn’t burn the way it does if the ordinary didn’t exist as its constant, faithful backdrop.
What interests me in what you’ve said is the word mimesis because romantic love is in some ways the one domain where we refuse imitation entirely, where we insist on the singular, the irreplaceable, the encounter that cannot be rehearsed. It exceeds every script we’ve been handed. That excess is where the sacred enters, not despite the ordinary but through the gaps the ordinary cannot quite close.
The interior landscape as the true theatre of it all. Yes. The outer events are only ever prompts.
So powerfully evocative with words alone. When your voice is added to the mix it takes on a deeper resonance. I read only the words the first time through. Then I listened several times without the words in front of me, then both together again. I even read it aloud myself the one time, then back to listening to you, with the words in front of me several more times. Every time you read anything you've written, your voice is completely congruent with the words you've written; with every listen the words support the reading while the reading supports the words. I don't say it's logical, only that it's true.
There are many words, phrases, that move me. "...like embers that refuse to fully sleep." In writing of the separation: "...not by anything but fears." "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." Just a few of them.
What is also true, is that there are so many different readers, each with their own unique and specific response to the same words, the same poem. What it evokes for me is not the same as for any other person. Which is one of your gifts: you write to each heart as if you know the specific, and that is how it is felt and received.
You mentioned in one of your responses to a comment your appreciation of how the form's restraint adds to its power. A while back a friend gave me a book on poetic forms which inspired me to try to write one of each. A few I'd tried before, but most I'd never tried. I thought it would be excruciating, and instead I found it exhilarating. The restriction and restraint offered a kind of freedom, and it makes me wonder now, why I stopped once I'd been through them all.
Congruence is the perfect word, not performance, not interpretation, but the voice and the text occupying the same emotional truth simultaneously. That you heard it that way, and tested it so methodically, going back repeatedly, reading it yourself, listening without the page… I love this, and it’s not passive reception, that’s active verification. You were checking whether the poem held under different conditions.
The observation about each reader receiving a different poem is one of the genuinely mysterious things about the form. Prose narrows as it goes, accumulates specificity, corners you into a shared meaning. Poetry works the opposite way, the compression opens outward, and something in the white space around the words leaves room for the reader’s own unspoken thing to move in and make itself at home. I don’t write to each heart individually. But somehow each heart finds its specific room in the same house. I’ve never fully understood how that works. I’m only grateful it does.
What you discovered about poetic form is what every writer finds who submits to constraint seriously… that the fence defines the field. Absolute freedom is actually the harder condition to write in, too much space, too many directions, no résistance to push against. The form gives you something to be precise within, and precision, paradoxically, is where the feeling lives most intensely.
The real question is why you stopped. That sounds like the beginning of something worth returning to….
Thank you, Doc, for bringing this quality of attention!
The answer to why I stopped. I could use the "oh, that was during the pandemic" excuse, which is true, it was, but not quite the reason. The truth is, I never felt I was a poet. While I was writing those poems with the forms, I did feel like a poet. The first and only time. I have literally books of poems I've written over the years, but never felt they were worthy. There was no real discipline, except when I learned haiku, and in my occasional forays into Shakespearean sonnets.
There were times, during the pandemic lockdown, when I'd be up at 5 or 5:30 on a summer morning and sit out on my little balcony overlooking my apartment parking lot and the trees that lined it, and write poems with that book's forms and restrictions. I also did some without the restrictions. No question which were better from the start, though the others could have been worked on to make them better. I did that with some, not all.
"The fence defines the field." I think you're right. Even the freely written poems have a few that had restrictions, some self-imposed, and they were the best of those written with some freedom. When I think about it, it was a time when I wasn't formally practicing (I'd had enough wake-up bells!), my parents were both dead (my dad only a year at that point) so those restrictions were gone, and in the lockdown there was no schedule as I was not working outside. My whole life was free from restrictions in many ways. And it was hard to live within that at times, even though I also knew I was incredibly lucky to be able to do so.
Now I'm formally practicing again, following a schedule, so maybe it is time to return to those forms as well.
What you’ve described is the paradox lived rather than observed: the moment your entire life opened into structurelessness, the forms became the lifeline. The fence was holding the self together when everything else had dissolved its edges. That’s the deeper function of discipline, any discipline… not to produce output but to provide the daily evidence that you still exist in a particular shape.
That you never felt like a poet despite books of poems is so common among people who actually write that it might be diagnostic. The ones who feel most certainly like poets often write the least interesting poems. The uncertainty is part of the seriousness!!!
Though it comes only soundlessly in the night, I imagine your subject does answer the liens you hold on him. My guess is, like you, he does so with similar lines quietly in his own still smouldering mind. I suspect the zephyrs that kiss your cheeks when you walk the river Seine are just residual breaths left by him moments or hours prior.
Surely he too says your name in the fading of the night when he sees a morning star drift silently into light.
Twin stars with true centripetal force torn asunder by separate centers of gravity. No galactic swaddling able to contain such bright heat. Mutual solar winds driving the subtle drift. Swapping their spiral for a spring. A centrifugal flattening of the flames.
No grievances to redress. Just distances uncompressed. When love thunders this precisely, its vibration continues, not as memories exactly, but as shimmers in every new day. How could you not feel him everywhere? Even so very subtlety in the new hands you hold.
And none of that is theft of the present, nor past bereft; it is merely radiation, the timeless dynamics of energy conserved. In a continuous unfolding of new forms. Something true walking the earth with a half life commensurate to its veracity.
The physics of it is exactly right… energy conserved, not lost, only translated into new forms. That’s the actual mechanics of how nothing true disappears. It transforms. It radiates.
What moves me the most in what you’ve written is the generosity of imagining his side of it. The poem is necessarily written from inside one consciousness, one shoreline. You’ve done what I couldn’t do from within the poem itself: granted him his own embers, his own morning star, his own recitation of a name. That symmetry reframes the whole thing. Not abandonment. Not asymmetry. Two people held apart by the very force that once pulled them together…
And yes. The Seine sometimes feels like that. Borrowed air….
Women love in an almost territorial way, it doesn’t occupy a space between, it occupies the self entirely. The distance I wrote about may be the map a more guarded heart draws to survive what it cannot release. You don’t need the map. That’s not a lesser feat… it may be the greater one.
This is what poetry should be: elegant without condescension, alluring to every pair of eyes that gaze upon it; possessing a sensitivity and sentimentality that make you wish you knew how to play the cello or violin, so you could accompany the poet’s longing! SUPERB!!!
The cello specifically, Otilia, not violin, not piano, tells me you heard the register perfectly. The cello lives in the part of the tonal range closest to the human voice, which is why it carries grief the way it does. Something in it vibrates at the frequency of things we can’t quite say.
So touched my poem made you wish for an instrument rather than words, and it is perhaps the finest thing anyone has said about it.
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.
“Most distances are drafts”… that’s the line I wish I’d written. There’s an entire essay living inside it: the idea that estrangement is rarely final, rarely even intended, just a version we kept failing to revise until revision became impossible.
The philosophical turn you take, proximity as illusion, is one I find genuinely unsettling in the best sense. We’ve built entire civilisations on the assumption that presence means something, that showing up constitutes a form of love. But the doorway image came precisely from that suspicion, that location is among the least reliable measures of closeness we have. Two people can be geographically inseparable and spiritually unreachable.
“Becoming large enough to hold what you cannot hold” ….. yes! That’s the only crossing available to most of us. Not resolution. Not reunion. Expansion. The one that doesn’t solve the loss but makes you a large enough vessel that the loss stops defining the edges.
Supernova mind, a star that gives everything and leaves something denser behind…. THAT is quite a compliment!
Thank you, Clara, for bringing your own brilliance to the reading! It showed.
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 :)))))
Sagan’s “star stuff” is usually invoked as consolation… we are vast, we are connected, but stars are also profligate, catastrophically generous, burning themselves into darkness for the sake of the light they cast. That’s not simple at all!!! That’s the most demanding love there is: the one love that gives without ledger-keeping, without the reasonable expectation of return. We romanticise it precisely because we can’t quite manage it.
As for modern poetry, much of it has traded music for gesture, the lyric line for the significant pause. There’s interesting work being done, but I’ll confess the forms that move me the most are still the ones that remember poetry began as song, not statement.
That you came to this through the spoken voice and found your way, that also delights me, Adam!
Consolation? I see star stuff as lineage. The cosmos was once one, now in endless forms (most beautiful) we see the separation and a severing from the one great singularity as a distant potential… as star stuff that distant potential collapses to a version of now with better, more cosmic proprioception.
Lineage rather than consolation changes everything. Consolation looks backward, softens a wound. Lineage implies inheritance, obligation even, a thread you’re responsible for carrying forward. We didn’t just come from stars; we are what the cosmos is doing with itself in this particular moment, feeling its own edges from the inside.
The universe knowing where its own limbs are… physics becoming self-aware. And if separation is the mechanism by which the singularity develops that awareness, then distance is how the whole learns to sense itself.
Which loops back, strangely, to the poem. Perhaps all longing is the cosmos reaching for its own coherence.….
This is majestic and poetic… very much in keeping with my understanding of divinity and even the soul… the universe witnessing itself both in vision and feeling (that proprioception I mentioned seems to have landed for you :)) is the thread that I perceive weaving through all of us. That lineage connects all to that notion in biology of a Last Universal Common Ancestor and for me that longing and that seeking for that original progenitor, nestled in the distant past and within the stars at the formation of the universe, this is where the sacred lives.
Feeling its own edges from insight… inside… yes… seeing the limits gives shape to existence… even if that shape looks to be limitless.
I’m sorry! Your poetry has me remarking on some rather deep aspects of my view of nature and divinity. Though, I feel confident that this was your intention!
Never apologise for going deep! That’s exactly where poetry is supposed to take you, and if it doesn’t, something has failed. The surface is for prose.
The Last Universal Common Ancestor as sacred origin, LUCA as a kind of secular genesis, is a genuinely beautiful convergence of the biological and the theological. What fascinates me is that longing, in this framing, is the universe’s own gravitational memory, the pull back toward a coherence it has been elaborating away from ever since. We don’t long because we are broken. We long because we are made of something that was once whole and hasn’t forgotten!
Seeing the limits gives shape to existence, of course! The finite is not the opposite of the sacred. It may be its most precise expression. A God without edges would be indistinguishable from nothing.
Your proprioception landed and kept expanding. That’s the best thing a good image can do. And you are a master of it.
This exchange — priceless.
Oh, but of course, the finite gives shape to everything on all levels—from quants to the cosmos. I’ve always enjoyed thinking of this in terms of cycles in nature, birth and death, seasons giving way to seasons, the end of your favourite book/movie/album, your career, each limit break imbues the story with a fully formed arc and that’s where meaning can be truly divined. And sacred, in its most fundamental form, is that which is separate… we have an itch to seek that which transcends this to something divine. Which sounds awful lot like how you described the “genuinely beautiful convergence of the biological and the theological.
My intuition (if you’ll permit me a little bit of speculation) is that notion you alluded to “we don’t long because we are broken. We long because we are made of something that was once whole and hasn’t forgotten!” That tension that tugs us towards the sacred, towards that which was once whole, or the universe’s own gravitational memory, these are impulses that keeps us seeking the ineffable. Which may look like seeking god, unity, transcendence… a kind of sacred striving.
And just one more layer deep (because you asked!) there is a sneaky double-bind that seems hardwired into the “shape of existence”: if we came from one and maintain that lineage, but can’t use our faculties to fully explain that desire to commune with the divine, and yet we still strive for reconciling that sacred “itch”… well that shape ensure that we continue to seek. Always seeking, you will never be able to hold it. And that can be overwhelming… until, perhaps, you realize that which we seek is here… in every moment that we take our discernment from mind to body and back again. That ineffable, sacred, universe’s-own-gravitational-memory, that divinity lives here… before concepts. Always ineffable, never graspable… perfectly so. Because even if you glimpse the sacred it will slip through your fingers. And thus you keep going.
Or not. We are just riffing on poetry… right!?
Amazing, dear Tamara and your voice, oh, your angelic voice!
Thank you so much, Monica, for always being by my side!
Distance can be sustained by silence, but also maintained by decision. The “ordinary years” and “fears” you describe are choices repeated over time. Love does not erode by accident. It is deferred, postponed, rationalized. And that makes your final gesture—“that I crossed without a crossing”—even sharper. The only real crossing available is internal: the choice to release what fear once preserved.
Your poem is the strongest where it is precise rather than abstract, when distance becomes “the space inside the music where a single note is gone”. That image proves your control. You tell us the absence hurts; you show us the shape of what’s missing.
What a formidable anatomy of avoidance. And that honesty is what makes it resonate, Tamara.
Fear presents itself as weather, something that happens to us, but you’re right that it operates through decisions, small and repeatable, each one feeling too minor to count until the accumulation is irreversible. The ordinary years are ordinary precisely because no single one of them looked like the year everything changed.
The musical image came from a very specific experience of hearing a familiar piece and sensing something structurally wrong before identifying what, the absence had a shape before it had a name. That’s what this loss feels like to me. Not the note itself but the negative space it leaves in the pattern.
“Anatomy of avoidance” is more precise than what I managed to say about my own poem.
Thank you, Alexander, for reading with a critic’s eye rather than just a reader’s heart! Both matter, but they don’t always arrive together.
This is breathtaking. The restraint of it, the steadiness, the way you refuse melodrama and instead let the ache speak in a quiet, unwavering voice, that’s such a hard balance to achieve. Lines like “distance is not made of oceans, it is made of what we keep” are sublime.
What moves me the most is how gently you treat the separation. You don’t blame. You don’t dramatize. You name fear, silence, time, the ordinary erosions that so often undo us, and that feels devastatingly honest. It made me think about how many of our great losses are not explosions but weathering.
Sometimes distance is also a form of protection. We keep someone at a distance because love is too powerful to survive mishandling.
I love that you suggest that some reunions happen in consciousness, in surrender, in whatever lies beyond the measurable.
Thank you for writing something so tender and intelligent, Tamara. I love your poetry.
The distinction you draw between explosions and weathering is one I want to keep. Catastrophic loss has its own grammar, it has a before and after. But the slow type, the one my poem is about, leaves no clean edge. You don’t know it’s happened until you reach for something that’s no longer there. Grief without incident is almost harder to justify to yourself, let alone to anyone else.
The reunion in consciousness… I believe in that more than I probably should admit. The measurable world is not where the most important things happen. It’s where they leave their marks.
Thank you, Céline, for reading with so much tenderness!
Quel talent, Tamara. This is how we see real talent.
Merci, Céline! :)))
Yes. “ The measurable world is not where the most important things happen” 💫
The sad and sweet of life.
Traditional form, refreshing.
Thank you once again Tamara.
Traditional form is the difference between a river and a flood. The constraint is what gives the feeling somewhere to go.
Thank you, Peter, for receiving my art!
Tamara, you stand out as such a beacon of unflinching honesty in the explorations of both the personal and societal. I don't often comment, because it seems superfluous, but rest assured I always look forward to your messages from the depths of unrelenting enquiry. I have a question. What age were you when you encountered English?
I am glad that you read me so deeply and that you comment once in a while.
I was 8. Mother tongue — Romanian, first language — French, second language — English.
I, uncharacteristically, have almost nothing to say. Utterly gorgeous.
Sometimes the poem has done its work when it leaves the reader without recourse to language. That silence is the rarest review. Thank you, Andrew, for offering it anyway!
I left a clumsy poem in the comments of your work last week,
It seems you were listening to those emotions I couldn't speak.
'Twas for me 'twixt Berlin and London where that distance used to live.
You've named what I have carried across all those years, but couldn't give.
There’s nothing clumsy about a poem that tells the truth, form follows courage, and you had the harder task: writing toward something still unresolved rather than back at something survived.
Thank you, Lorne, for trusting your own words here first, and then finding something of yours in mine!
Oh Tamara!!
To be pulled beneath the sublime surface of your written and spoken words. Having the deepest secrets of one's heart teased to a roaring memorial flame.
Such enchantment is uniquely yours and not to be missed.
This sonnet, this timeless echo, is both thorn and suave but nourishing above all.
Thank you for presenting the ache we never quite forget, with such beauty.
You are a treasure!
_/)o
Thorn and salve simultaneously… that’s the only beauty worth trusting. The purely comforting poem flatters; the purely wounding one merely performs. What lives between them, what catches and then holds, is the rarer thing.
That the ache is nourishing rather than merely painful… I believe that. Some feelings we carry because they’re load-bearing. They hold something essential in place.
Thank you for receiving it with such an open chest! I am moved.
The Pitch and the impeccable grammar a powerful combination for give a tear a good reason to create a new alternative.
Thanks Tamara
“Poetry is a language against you don’t have defenses “
Wittgenstein
Thank you so much, Juan Carlos! You move me.
Beautiful, "A Calling Across Forever," of soul to soul, in this lifetime and its proximate; for what is romance but an heroic endeavor above the ordinary day, to unite the seemingly impossible come what may. The wonderful rhyming couplets, give form to this expression perfectly!
Thank you Tamara, the muse has its way, in showcasing what you say, true to the depths of love's emphatic identity with the other. Bravissimo!
Romance as heroic endeavour, that reframing lifts it out of sentiment entirely and places it where it belongs: in the category of things that require courage rather than feeling. The ordinary day is not the enemy of love but its constant test, and most love fails through a slow failure of nerve.
The muse, when it arrives, is less inspiration than demand. You comply or you don’t. This one insisted.
Thank you so much, Michael!
Absolutely, Tamara, the ordinary day is the hinge upon which the miracle Play of Life manifests. Romance in this regard is above the mimesis of our everyday expectations.
The exception of Romance proves the rule, as the normative performance structures of our social world serves as the backdrop to the figurative dance of love in our private lives, and where, in the experience of all the ironies and mythical dimensions coming through the events of the ordinary day, we are able to reach for the ultimate significance of the sacred found in our interior landscapes of soul.
The hinge image is exact, not the grand occasions but the daily rotation, the small repeated movements that either open or close a life. And you’re right that romance derives its charge precisely from that contrast: it wouldn’t burn the way it does if the ordinary didn’t exist as its constant, faithful backdrop.
What interests me in what you’ve said is the word mimesis because romantic love is in some ways the one domain where we refuse imitation entirely, where we insist on the singular, the irreplaceable, the encounter that cannot be rehearsed. It exceeds every script we’ve been handed. That excess is where the sacred enters, not despite the ordinary but through the gaps the ordinary cannot quite close.
The interior landscape as the true theatre of it all. Yes. The outer events are only ever prompts.
So powerfully evocative with words alone. When your voice is added to the mix it takes on a deeper resonance. I read only the words the first time through. Then I listened several times without the words in front of me, then both together again. I even read it aloud myself the one time, then back to listening to you, with the words in front of me several more times. Every time you read anything you've written, your voice is completely congruent with the words you've written; with every listen the words support the reading while the reading supports the words. I don't say it's logical, only that it's true.
There are many words, phrases, that move me. "...like embers that refuse to fully sleep." In writing of the separation: "...not by anything but fears." "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." Just a few of them.
What is also true, is that there are so many different readers, each with their own unique and specific response to the same words, the same poem. What it evokes for me is not the same as for any other person. Which is one of your gifts: you write to each heart as if you know the specific, and that is how it is felt and received.
You mentioned in one of your responses to a comment your appreciation of how the form's restraint adds to its power. A while back a friend gave me a book on poetic forms which inspired me to try to write one of each. A few I'd tried before, but most I'd never tried. I thought it would be excruciating, and instead I found it exhilarating. The restriction and restraint offered a kind of freedom, and it makes me wonder now, why I stopped once I'd been through them all.
It is truly beautiful, and deeply moving.
Thank you, Tamara.
Congruence is the perfect word, not performance, not interpretation, but the voice and the text occupying the same emotional truth simultaneously. That you heard it that way, and tested it so methodically, going back repeatedly, reading it yourself, listening without the page… I love this, and it’s not passive reception, that’s active verification. You were checking whether the poem held under different conditions.
The observation about each reader receiving a different poem is one of the genuinely mysterious things about the form. Prose narrows as it goes, accumulates specificity, corners you into a shared meaning. Poetry works the opposite way, the compression opens outward, and something in the white space around the words leaves room for the reader’s own unspoken thing to move in and make itself at home. I don’t write to each heart individually. But somehow each heart finds its specific room in the same house. I’ve never fully understood how that works. I’m only grateful it does.
What you discovered about poetic form is what every writer finds who submits to constraint seriously… that the fence defines the field. Absolute freedom is actually the harder condition to write in, too much space, too many directions, no résistance to push against. The form gives you something to be precise within, and precision, paradoxically, is where the feeling lives most intensely.
The real question is why you stopped. That sounds like the beginning of something worth returning to….
Thank you, Doc, for bringing this quality of attention!
The answer to why I stopped. I could use the "oh, that was during the pandemic" excuse, which is true, it was, but not quite the reason. The truth is, I never felt I was a poet. While I was writing those poems with the forms, I did feel like a poet. The first and only time. I have literally books of poems I've written over the years, but never felt they were worthy. There was no real discipline, except when I learned haiku, and in my occasional forays into Shakespearean sonnets.
There were times, during the pandemic lockdown, when I'd be up at 5 or 5:30 on a summer morning and sit out on my little balcony overlooking my apartment parking lot and the trees that lined it, and write poems with that book's forms and restrictions. I also did some without the restrictions. No question which were better from the start, though the others could have been worked on to make them better. I did that with some, not all.
"The fence defines the field." I think you're right. Even the freely written poems have a few that had restrictions, some self-imposed, and they were the best of those written with some freedom. When I think about it, it was a time when I wasn't formally practicing (I'd had enough wake-up bells!), my parents were both dead (my dad only a year at that point) so those restrictions were gone, and in the lockdown there was no schedule as I was not working outside. My whole life was free from restrictions in many ways. And it was hard to live within that at times, even though I also knew I was incredibly lucky to be able to do so.
Now I'm formally practicing again, following a schedule, so maybe it is time to return to those forms as well.
What you’ve described is the paradox lived rather than observed: the moment your entire life opened into structurelessness, the forms became the lifeline. The fence was holding the self together when everything else had dissolved its edges. That’s the deeper function of discipline, any discipline… not to produce output but to provide the daily evidence that you still exist in a particular shape.
That you never felt like a poet despite books of poems is so common among people who actually write that it might be diagnostic. The ones who feel most certainly like poets often write the least interesting poems. The uncertainty is part of the seriousness!!!
Good like with the new practice, Doc!
Though it comes only soundlessly in the night, I imagine your subject does answer the liens you hold on him. My guess is, like you, he does so with similar lines quietly in his own still smouldering mind. I suspect the zephyrs that kiss your cheeks when you walk the river Seine are just residual breaths left by him moments or hours prior.
Surely he too says your name in the fading of the night when he sees a morning star drift silently into light.
Twin stars with true centripetal force torn asunder by separate centers of gravity. No galactic swaddling able to contain such bright heat. Mutual solar winds driving the subtle drift. Swapping their spiral for a spring. A centrifugal flattening of the flames.
No grievances to redress. Just distances uncompressed. When love thunders this precisely, its vibration continues, not as memories exactly, but as shimmers in every new day. How could you not feel him everywhere? Even so very subtlety in the new hands you hold.
And none of that is theft of the present, nor past bereft; it is merely radiation, the timeless dynamics of energy conserved. In a continuous unfolding of new forms. Something true walking the earth with a half life commensurate to its veracity.
Haunting and beautiful verses, Tamara.
The physics of it is exactly right… energy conserved, not lost, only translated into new forms. That’s the actual mechanics of how nothing true disappears. It transforms. It radiates.
What moves me the most in what you’ve written is the generosity of imagining his side of it. The poem is necessarily written from inside one consciousness, one shoreline. You’ve done what I couldn’t do from within the poem itself: granted him his own embers, his own morning star, his own recitation of a name. That symmetry reframes the whole thing. Not abandonment. Not asymmetry. Two people held apart by the very force that once pulled them together…
And yes. The Seine sometimes feels like that. Borrowed air….
Thank you so much for this, Andrew! I am moved.
There's no between
All's inside me
The years have passed
The love has stayed
Being a woman
I know of no between
LJ, Bathsheba
Women love in an almost territorial way, it doesn’t occupy a space between, it occupies the self entirely. The distance I wrote about may be the map a more guarded heart draws to survive what it cannot release. You don’t need the map. That’s not a lesser feat… it may be the greater one.
Words I needed to hear today. Catharsis by way of serendipity. So beautifully written. You’re an incredibly talented soul 🫶🏽
Thank you so much! Your words moved me.
This is what poetry should be: elegant without condescension, alluring to every pair of eyes that gaze upon it; possessing a sensitivity and sentimentality that make you wish you knew how to play the cello or violin, so you could accompany the poet’s longing! SUPERB!!!
The cello specifically, Otilia, not violin, not piano, tells me you heard the register perfectly. The cello lives in the part of the tonal range closest to the human voice, which is why it carries grief the way it does. Something in it vibrates at the frequency of things we can’t quite say.
So touched my poem made you wish for an instrument rather than words, and it is perhaps the finest thing anyone has said about it.
Thank you for hearing it that precisely!